Our group is interested in examining the way that online communication
affects the way that people can misrepresent themselves with meeting and
getting to know/trying to date people online. Dating websites or simply
online forums or social networks such as MYSPACE, where you don't see the
person or even initially hear their voice can give people a chance to be
deceiving. They can give descriptions of themselves that they think
people want to hear, not truly accurate descriptions. We want to find
ways to investigate the accuracy of people's descriptions of themselves
and the type of people they are looking for.
Furthermore, we want to evaluate the success rate of being matched up
with someone of those people who represent themselves accurately as
opposed to those who do not. We plan to talk with people who have done
this process both sucessfully and non-sucessfully.
We plan to do this not only by evaluating people who have used this form
of communication to actually meet someone, but also by individually
using such a means of technology and seeing if we personally have a
desire or an urge to misrepresent ourselves and in what way. Depending
on the exact form of internet communication we are using, we will see
how often opportunities to deceive will come up.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Objectives
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6 comments:
We will discuss and further specify what we would like to study when more information presents itself.
It'll be very interesting to see wher e your research leads. Even if users of MySpace or Facebook don't lie explicitly, there are so many ways for people projecting an enhanced image to do so, such as using a studio glamour portrait as a profile picture.
Though, one thing I wonder is if you're going to have trouble finding experimental subjects; it's kind of embarrassing to be exposed as lying about yourself on an online dating site, so hopefully such people will still come forward. It also seems like you will have to recruit extensively for participants since I'm not sure that online dating sites are popular enough, especially for college students, to allow many subjects to be recruited from Cornell classrooms.
To further Rodney's post with anecdotal evidence, most of my friends on MySpace are my friends offline as well... almost all of them have some strange representation of themselves as their online profile. MySpace facilities this by enabling users to customize their page--unlike facebook. Well, there are certain elements of facebook that are customizable, but for the most part, all profiles look the same.
Finding those people with "true" myspace profiles may be a challenge, but if you are successful, the resulting data will be very interesting to see. MySpace is the epitome of social networking--any quantifiable data enabling you to discover conclusions would be a very entertain read. I'm excited to see what you guy find.
It will certainly be an interesting project! I really like the concept you are working with.
As Leo mentioned, although many (if not most) Cornellians use facebook, the majority are friends with (or at least met at one period in time) the people they are facebook friends with. Thus I'm not really sure if you could get away with explicitly lying.
To make individuals more comfortable asking questions and less likely to lie due to embarassment, you might try starting off with value questions regarding facebook and myspace accounts. ie, Do you feel like you have more control projecting your image/personality/etc on your facebook account rather than in real life. Then from there you could get more specific. If you ask people outright whether or not they lie on their facebook or myspace, I'm skepical if they would tell the truth.
Interesting idea! Going along with prior comments, I agree that it might be very difficult to find people who fulfill your participant requirements. One way to get around that issue might be to make the set up more experimental (rather than retrospective) - Have people come into the lab and set up a profile. I'm not sure about the specifics of your study but this way you might also have more control over your variables. Looking forward to hearing more about it.
I think that this topic should be very interesting to research. When people are supplied with a communication medium to hide behind, I think there is an increased tendency to embellish or misrepresent yourself. The only question I have is, How will you be able to distinguish which profiles are “true” and which ones are misrepresented? Unless you know the test sample and are able to distinguish the profiles, I think it is going to be difficult to figure this out. However, If you guys are able to overcome this, I think this should be an interesting research topic.
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