Assignment 2

I decided to choose a moderately-populated chat room at random for this assignment.

I didn't have to wait long to be engaged in conversation. After someone made a general call for "a/s/l" I was messaged privately by "rlgator7," a 27-year-old male currently living in Arizona. He's taking classes at a local college and working at a music store part-time. He enjoys reading science fiction and fantasy, and likes techno/trance music.

I spoke to him for twenty minutes to a half an hour before he signed off, saying he had to go to work. It was easy to analyze my impressions of his personality according to the Big Five personality traits. In terms of conscientiousness, he mostly lead the discussion and paid attention to the details of my answers, often asking for clarification, and periodically questioning as to whether he was being too "personal," forward, etc. This overlaps with agreeableness; he was very forthcoming in providing information about himself and used a lot (though not to an excessive degree) of emoticons, which always gives the impression of a more open and friendly personality. We mostly discussed music, and he was respectful of my markedly different tastes. In regards to neuroticism, he seemed fairly calm for the duration of the conversation, though a bit hyper-aware of potentially offending me. Though our main topic of conversation wasn't a "traditionally" controversial topics like politics or religion, we both had very strong opinions as to what constituted a decent band. Despite that, the atmosphere remained very comfortable. He was incredibly open in regards to his own life, willingly supplied information (often without my asking), and didn't expect me to necessarily reciprocate. He was very obviously extroverted, even admitting to this himself ("I only go into these things when I'm bored and have time to kill. They're so vague," were his exact words). He said he preferred face-to-face communication and really didn't spend a lot of time in chat rooms or on instant messenger programs.

My experience resonated perfectly with the Hyperpersonal Theory and the over-attribution process, as I formed a rather definitive impression of this individual almost immediately, despite being given a small amount of completely generic social cues. I felt as if my mental picture was fairly accurate. A lot of selective self-presentation took place on my part, because I am perpetually uncomfortable with giving out finer details online, but (as far as I could tell) he seemed to have no such issues, and he seemed to have no underlying motives in conversing with me other than to "kill time."