Chatting with SmarterChild would have been much more interesting.

At the beginning of this assignment, I decided the best psychological space in which I could observe and interact with a target was a chat room. The synchronous nature of this forum would allow me to obtain the feedback necessary to form an impression of one of the people with whom I was chatting and judge his or her personality characteristics. Also, I hoped there would be enough people in the chat room so that I could avoid mistakenly chatting with a web bot that wanted me to look at her web cam.

I entered a chat room and after lurking and reading the conversation for several minutes, I accepted another user’s invitation to chat privately. I thought, since he had initiated the chat, he would at the very least hold up his end of the conversation. When we did start conversing, his responses seemed cold and often left much to be desired. Reflecting back on the conversation, the reason I found his responses to be inadequate and began to develop an unfavorable impression of him was that he continually violated the Gricean maxim of quantity. When in a conversation with another person, one’s contribution should be as informative as required and not more so. My new friend “Cardinal1408” seemed to be trying to answer my questions with as few words as possible and never once asked me a question in turn. After telling me that he didn’t go to school, I asked if he had a job. His response was simply, “No.” When I asked what he did for fun, he replied, “Hang out at home.” After about ten minutes of answers similar to that, I bid my new friend farewell.

Based on my impression of Cardinal, I would have rated him as being extremely introverted and having below average openness and agreeableness. I do not feel as though I gathered enough information to rate his neuroticism or conscientiousness. One aspect of our conversation that I found quite striking was the fact that Cardinal didn’t seem to be engaging in selective self-presentation. He was barely presenting himself at all in fact. The details about himself that he did reveal were all direct answers to questions that I had asked him. If he was indeed reallocating cognitive resources that ordinarily would be used in a face to face conversation to better manage the impression he was making, it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. The strong impressions I formed about his level of extroversion, openness, and agreeableness were more intense than they might have been in person due to over-attribution processes. Having little else to go on, his short answers, lack of reciprocity, and the effect of the fundamental attribution error, may have caused me to overvalue the effect of personality and undervalue situational factors in the behaviors I observed.

Overall, my chat experience conformed more closely to the hyperpersonal model than the CFO perspective or Social Information Processing Theory. The impressions I formed lacked breadth (I only felt comfortable making a judgment on three out of five personality measures) but certainly made up for it in intensity. The CFO perspective would have predicted that my impression would have been fairly neutral and that was not the case. My impression of Cardinal suffered from the common problem of CMC in that the environment made me over-attribute the limited information I had solely to his personality. Our conversation was not noteworthy because he engaged in selective self-presentation and reallocated cognitive resources, but rather it was interesting that he did not. Another reason for Cardinal’s reticence could have been that I never allowed a significant amount of time to pass between his answer and my next question. The behavioral confirmation aspect of the hyperpersonal model may have been at work since I eventually established myself as the dominant information seeker and he as the passive informer. Treating him as a passive participant in our conversation may have made him become one.