For this assignment i chose to talk to a friend to a friend of a fellow student summer student at Cornell and analyze and compare my impression of him and my friend's impression of him. The conversation took place over AOL Instant Messager (AIM) and lasted about one hour. I used my friend's AIM screenname for convenience, but made sure to inform the subject that i was not the owner of the screenname. I did not mention this assignment until the subject specifically asked me about my motives for talking to him.
My conversation with my friend's friend began with me introducing myself. The subject did not offer his name to me, although his screen name was similar to his name, but rather commented on my name's relationship to Neo from The Matrix. After a short sort of "trial conversation," about people who like like actors or have names similar to movie characters' names, we proceeded to the topic of music and remained on it for the majority of the conversation. Ironically, during the conversation the subject volunteered the name of a member of his band but chose to remain anonymous himself. He sent me his band's myspace page and after listening to his music I mentioned that I was not a big fan of it, especially the vocals. The subject then became defensive and we began to argue, albeit calmly, about the importance of vocals in music.
After about 45 minutes, the subject began to become suspicious of me because of the things I mentioned during the conversation were coincidentally some of the things that he felt very passionately about. It was very interesting to see that as more info was exchanged, the subject became very tense and suspicious of me and my intentions. I believe that this is because there is so much deception on the internet that thanks to the media and personal horror stories, youth are encouraged to be distrustful of people that they meet on the internet. After explaining my assignment to him, he proceeded to try to end the conversation by claiming that he was "sleepy."
When the conversation had come to a close, I went online and took a personality test to determine my impression of him when it came to the Big 5 Personality Traits. The results were as follows:
Openness: 53% - slightly open to new experiences
Conscientiousness: 13% - disorganized, undependable, negligent
Extraversion: 97% - sociable, friendly, fun loving, talkative
Agreeableness: 1% - critical, rude, harsh, callous
Neuroticism: 76% - nervous, high-strung, insecure, worrying
The traits were scored on a 1% (strongly disagree) to 100% (strongly agree) scale. Because there was no :insufficient information" choice, i was forced to select the neutral choice for questions that I was uncomfortable answering about the subject. This has caused my results to be slightly skewed in favor of neutrality. Because i was unable to answer many of the questions about openness, my experiment supported the hyperpersonal model. However, unlike the hyperpersonal model predicts, I was able to form an impression on conscientiousness. Also my impressions supported the hyperpersonal model's hypothesis that CMC impressions would be much more intense, with mine being mostly on the negative side.
My friends results were as follows:
Openness: 80% - enjoys new experiences
Conscientiousness: 17% - disorganized, undependable, negligent
Extraversion: 89% - sociable, friendly, fun loving, talkative
Agreeableness: 0% - critical, rude, harsh, callous
Neuroticism: 55% - neither particularly nervous nor particularly calm
The main differences between the two impression (mine and my friend's) were in the areas of openness and neuroticism. My impression revealed him to be unopen to new experiences because he was very stubborn about his beliefs during the conversation. Also, i perceived him to be nervous and suspicious because he questioned my motives about 3/4 of the way through the conversation. The other characteristics were very similar because my long conversation with him enabled me to find out a lot about his personality by observing his choice of words and the quickness/strength of his responses. If the conversation had been shorter the results would have been even more extreme than they were.
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So, it seems from your post, that this individual was, in fact, exercising quite a bit of impression formation about you! Judging by his defensiveness and suspicion, he seemed to making his own conclusions about your personality. It is interesting to see how both communicator's assumptions can lead to friendship or dislike. As we are continually building conclusions, our partner is doing the very same. As a result, we both make decisions based on very limited information (which many others have noted in their posts as one layer of the Hyperpersonal Model). To me, this seems almost unfair. However, I began to think about this meeting in the context of a face-to-face interaction. Imagine if you were meeting your summer school friend's buddy in the dining hall or at a party. I bet you would build the same impression. Not only that, I bet that your interaction would be much shorter- visual and other cues would alert you earlier to this individual's personality traits. Regardless, I thought it was interesting that you compared your impression to your friend's (who knew the individual). It actually doesn't seem that knowing an individual beforehand changes your impression significantly. I would like to see if that theory holds true in other people's studies.
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