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
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3 comments:
This is certainly an interesting and relevant subject. How exactly are you going to be studying language within this context though? Maybe there are certain phrases or keys that are used more often in deceptive profiles. Or perhaps, what language cues do other people look for to determine if a profile is deceptive or not? Just some ideas.
I’d also suggest that you talk to Catalina Toma (grad student in the Comm Dept). She just completed her master’s thesis on deception in online dating, so she could have some very good pointers for you. Good luck!
I mentioned this in class, but I just want to clarify it. As it stands, it sounds like you want to talk to various people who've used such a service, either successfully or unsuccessfully. It's in these services' best interests, however, to remain confidential, and by going and searching for people who've used the service to disclose their experience, you're probably going to find only extreme positive and extreme negative experiences, nothing in between.
Going through the process yourself will help you develop ideas on the topic, but shouldn't be the data you pick from, since you will obviously already know what your experiment's about and what your hypothesis is. Instead, you can have subjects go through the process of setting up a profile (WITHOUT knowing that your experiment's on deception), then give them your own questions afterward. Alternately, it really wouldn't be too hard to set up your own system mimicking personality profiles on these sites before subjects meet each other.
I think this is actually a pretty cool topic. I bet you will probably find considerable deception from most people. In particular, I would predict the lower quality dating site the more deception. I would also wager that a large portion of the deception lies within the areas of profession and income. This is fairly easy to lie about especially for the first date. There are of course some barriers you will have to overcome. The first one would be a signed release from the people who you are analyzing on these dating sites. The next barrier would be to figure out how to contact people on these sites. I think your best bet here would be to use some kind of local dating services as the people will be easier to contact (I probably wouldn’t try to use Cornell students since they will probably be less likely to accept). Overall I think this project has the potential to be very informative should the barriers be overcome.
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