2nd blog

For this assignment I chose an anonymous chat room, a synchronous psychological space.

After several attempts made at starting a conversation, I was finally able to chat with “Starry Child87”, a 20 years old girl from northern Alabama. She’s a sophomore at Alabama State University majoring in chemistry. She enjoys playing softball and is a big fan of modern art.

During my half-hour long conversation with “Starry Child87”, I attempted to analyze her personality according to the Big Five Personality Traits. As far as conscientiousness, “Starry Child87” seemed to be very attentive throughout our discussion and responded to my questions fairly quickly and with a complete answer. She also seemed to notice right away if sometime she said offended me and often took the lead in asking further questions. “Starry Child87” scored high in agreeableness as well. She helped create a peaceful environment in which to converse by avoiding personal and controversial topics. She also strongly agreed with me on a couple of points. As far as neuroticism, “Starry Child87” seemed to behave very calmly throughout the entire conversation. It must be said though that the issues we discussed were not provocative enough to push her boundaries and to thus detect any potential distress. Another trait I observed was openness. “Starry Child87” appeared to be open and willing to sharing information regarding her favorite bands and her artists, and even disclosed more private in formations such as the name of the town she lives in. Finally, as far as extraversion, “Starry Child87” ranked quite high. She was willing to share information about her family, made a few jokes about being from the south and also asked if we could talk again at a later time. Although at first she seemed skeptical to tell me which school she attended, finding out I was a junior at Cornell University (self-disclosure), led her to open up and share that she attends Alabama State University.

The “Hyperpersonal Theory” best describes my experience. The theory states that we tend to “…form more stereotyped impressions based on limited social and interpersonal cues available...” (Hancock, Dunham, 328). Because of the “over-attribution process”, after just 30 minutes of conversation I felt like I knew “Starry Child87” quite well and led me to overestimate her traits and placed her into a set category, following a stereotype. The “breadth” of my knowledge regarding her personality was quite limited and not very detailed but I still felt like I had an accurate opinion of her (high in “intensity”). Also, because “Starry Child87” and I were communicating via chat and not face to face, much “selective self-presentation” was taking place on my part, and I’m sure on hers as well. Finally, once she found out I attend Cornell, she immediately made a few comments about how “smart” and ”bright” I must be. This “behavioral confirmation” lead me to feel “smarter” and “brighter” than I did before she made the comment. In conclusion, because of this computer mediated communication, it was much harder to rank neuroticism, extraversion and agreeableness, as these are all traits that can much easily be detected in face to face conversations.