Rothchild Evan, Phillips Sarah, Baker Caroline, Wang Fei, Ricci Joseph Andrew
Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, NY, USA.
Division of Plastic Surgery, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Great Neck, NY, USA.
Aesthetic Plast Surg. 2025 Jun 27. doi: 10.1007/s00266-025-05003-7.
Social media has emerged as an essential platform for plastic surgeons to advertise to potential new patients. Among the various factors influencing a patient's choice of physician, implicit bias plays a significant role. This study aims to investigate whether a surgeon's gender or race, as presented in their social media profile picture, affects the perception of their competence and the likelihood of attracting patients.
Two side-by-side sample Instagram posts were created. Each post displayed a before-and-after photograph of a common plastic surgery procedure and featured one of eight possible profile pictures generated using artificial intelligence, with variations only in gender and race. Surveys containing the posts, which only differed in the surgeon's profile pictures, were distributed to respondents to evaluate perceived surgeon competence, likelihood of recruiting patients, likelihood of making a referral, and willingness to visit the surgeon's profile.
A total of 1777 respondents participated. The average scores were 3.74 (SD=0.98) for competence, 3.64 (SD=1.06) for patient recruitment likelihood, 3.72 (SD=1.00) for referral, and 3.68 (SD=1.05) for social media influence. Surgeon ethnicity or gender did not significantly affect scores, and no significant pairwise differences were found between respondent and surgeon ethnicities across all categories.
Our results showed no significant differences in patient recruitment, referral likelihood, perceived competence, or social media influence based on surgeon gender or race. These findings suggest that using controlled images, which standardize factors like clothing, name, and other superficial identifying features, may help reduce the influence of demographic biases.
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社交媒体已成为整形外科医生向潜在新患者做广告的重要平台。在影响患者选择医生的各种因素中，隐性偏见起着重要作用。本研究旨在调查外科医生在社交媒体个人资料图片中呈现的性别或种族是否会影响对其能力的认知以及吸引患者的可能性。
创建了两个并排的样本Instagram帖子。每个帖子展示了一个常见整形手术的前后照片，并配有使用人工智能生成的八种可能的个人资料图片之一，仅在性别和种族上有所不同。将包含这些帖子（仅外科医生的个人资料图片不同）的调查问卷分发给受访者，以评估对外科医生能力的认知、招募患者的可能性、进行推荐的可能性以及访问外科医生个人资料的意愿。
共有1777名受访者参与。能力的平均得分为3.74（标准差=0.98），招募患者可能性的平均得分为3.64（标准差=1.06），推荐的平均得分为3.72（标准差=1.00），社交媒体影响力的平均得分为3.68（标准差=1.05）。外科医生的种族或性别对得分没有显著影响，并且在所有类别中，受访者和外科医生的种族之间未发现显著的两两差异。
我们的结果表明，基于外科医生的性别或种族，在患者招募、推荐可能性、感知能力或社交媒体影响力方面没有显著差异。这些发现表明，使用标准化服装、姓名和其他表面识别特征等因素的受控图像可能有助于减少人口统计学偏见的影响。
证据级别III：本期刊要求作者为每篇文章指定证据级别。有关这些循证医学评级的完整描述，请参阅目录或作者在线指南www.springer.com/00266 。
