Assignment 2: Chatrooms

For this assignment, I decided to use the synchronous communication capabilities of a chat room. I entered into a general chat and had a lot of trouble getting a conversation going. After unsuccessfully trying to have a continuous conversation with people in the general chat room, I decided to try a private chat in a music chat room. This ended up working out and I talked to a guy called Punk Rocker for about fifteen minutes.
My impressions of some of Punk Rocker’s traits were better than I thought they would be. I would guess that he is quite open to experience in the fact that he was putting himself out there in a chat room. As far as conscientiousness is concerned, I cannot really form an impression of that from the conversation we had. On the extraversion scale I would rate him highly. He didn’t seem to have trouble talking to me even though he did not know me and he also kept the conversation going. I would rate him highly on agreeableness. He was very friendly and likeable throughout out chat, never being rude at any point. His responses always showed that he cared about what was said, adding phrases such as “that is so interesting”. From our conversation I would put him very low on the neuroticism scale. He showed not signs of being anxious, angry, or shy. His text did not point to signs of neuroticism, as he was always positive in attitude and emotionally stable, although I wouldn’t be able to say for sure that is that he is like in the “real world” since I gave him no reason to get upset.
Looking back at the impressions I got of Punk Rocker from my short encounter, I would say some traits I found very difficult to rate in the chat, however, the ones that I could rate were at the extremes of the spectrums instead of the more median impressions one might expect to get from such a short encounter. This supports the over-attribution aspect of the Hyperpersonal Model. The breadth of traits I could rate was not very high, but the intensity was. I only felt really sure about Punk Rocker’s extraversion, agreeableness, and partly neuroticism, and he was rated very high or low in these traits. At the same time, Punk Rocker could have been using selective self-presentation, only presenting to me in the chat room traits that he wants to me to see. On top of that, I already had a preconceived notion of what he would be like from his screenname, so I adapted most of the things he said to the personality I believe a punk rocker might like using behavioral confirmation. His kindness proved to appear even more profound as one may expect punk rockers to be more nonchalant than he was. Overall, it was a very interesting encounter and with all my cognitive resources re-allocated to focus on his text, I feel like I got to know a lot about this Punk Rocker in the fifteen minutes I spoke to him.