Assignment 3: The Affect of Viewing Online Profiles on Introductory Conversations
(I am working individually.)
I will be studying the situation where two people meet in an online situation, and one of the participants has had access to online information about their partner, and how this “asymmetric information” is handled.
I previously found that people will introduce this information using a probe – they ask their partner questions, even though they already know the answer to the question.
This is a very odd type of lie – they are misleading the person to give them the impression that they do not already know this information about them.
I am really interested in looking at this type of probe question in more depth, and in more realistic scenarios.
I hope to find out people’s motivations for doing this, and the effect it has on conversations.
This is important primarily because meeting people online is quickly becoming more and more common.
Last semester I found that most people in the study had met someone new online at least once.
With the growth of social networking sites, and the popularity of online dating sites, it is very likely that we’ll all meet someone new online at some point.
And with these social/dating sites comes the completely new idea of a “profile” that was never experienced in Face-to-Face situations.
Previously, the only way you could find out about someone was through conversations with a mutual acquaintance (or through physical spying/stalking, but that’s obviously not commonly done), but online you are able to read huge amounts of personal information that the person themselves chose to divulge (not to mention anything you can find through other sources, like search engines).
With all this new information, it seems likely that it will be impacting first-meeting conversations, but it is unclear as to how.
It’s important for this class, because the internet really made this kind of deceptive probe as common as it is.
I plan (eventually) to do a full-scale study to look into these questions.
For the scope of this class, I may only get to a few smaller pilot studies, to test my procedures and get an idea of the results.
I will also be doing as much background research as possible, to see what has been found relating to this topic already, which will also help direct my study in certain ways.
I will give participants access to another student’s Facebook profile, have them talk online, and then use a variety of questionnaires and other information-gathering methods intended to gather information about this deception.
1 Comments:
I think this is a very interesting research topic because with the invent of thefacebook, it is likely that you will have seen someone's profile before ever meeting them. Once you do finally meet this person, should you pretend to not know where they live even if you know? Or would it appear as if you were somehow stalking them if you did know information about them, even if it was posted on a public site like thefacebook.
The type of lie you are talking about here is a very different type of lie because it is not necessarily verbal, but more of a withholding of information. It would be interesting if you could see how many people would use probing questions, pretend like they didn't know anything, or admit to have seeing information on the other person's profile.
This kind of study goes along very well with the ever-changing times, and I am looking forward to seeing what you find. Good luck!
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