The psychological space I decided to join for this assignment was a Yahoo Chat room named, ‘Flirts’. The reason I picked Yahoo chat is because in addition to a public chat room, you can also have a private chat with another person. Needing to make myself look like a cool girl who wants to chat, I selected my screen name to be ‘blueforyou84369’. After getting several private chat invitations as soon as I said that I was a female from California, I finally decided to chat with ‘badboy482’. Observing my comments after our conversation, I noticed various self-presentation tactics that I used to seem cool and attractive.
The self-description that I wished to provide was that I was a young and attractive girl who goes to a college in California. At first I introduced myself as being 24, but when ‘badboy’ said that he was just 19, I quickly changed my story and told him that I was actually 18. Oddly, he believed me and still kept chatting with me. The way I convinced him that I was in college was by making comments like, “Ahh.. I have so much biology homework to do and I have to go to Eric’s party.” The social associations with biology and partying worked in my favor as he started talking about balancing his academic life with his social life. Furthermore, I also observed myself employing attitude expression tactics by making flirtatious comments and making him talk more. I hoped that this way I would seem more attractive and interesting to ‘badboy.’ Again, to convince him that I was from California, I tried to associate myself with activities such as surfing, para sailing and being a big San Francisco 49ers fan. In addition to social associations, I also used sets, props and lighting tactics to solidify my online image of being a female. I accomplished this by picking a feminine screen name such as ‘blueforyou’ and used pink, Comic Sans MS font.
Since this was not a verbal, FtF conversation, my self-presentation tactics were heavily affected by the psychological space. Through a chat I was able to change my age, act more immature and was easily able to convince the other person that I went to a college in California. Also, since the person would not be able to hear any verbal cues, I was able to switch my age without him getting suspicious. Through this interesting exercise, I was not only able to learn how one can manipulate self-presentation tactics using different psychological spaces, but I was also scared to see how well I can behave like a female online.
5 comments:
I can’t believe “badboy” believed you after you changed your age! It just goes to show how easy it is to deceive someone when the medium allows for fewer cues. It’s also interesting to see that dropping just a few hints about surfing and the 49ers are all that were needed to convince “badboy” that you were from California. Similarly, using a pink font automatically makes one assume you are a girl. The cues we use to form an impression of someone online are extremely different than in face to face communication. This was a good way to see how your self-presentational tactics affect how others form an impression of you!
Congratulations on a job well done of fulfilling the role of a woman! I took on a similar role last week but instead of doing a gender swap I changed my age, location, profession, name, and hobbies. I am impressed with the fact that you were able to totally convince “badboy” that you were in fact an 18 year old girl from California and good recovery with the age mess-up. I had such a hard time sticking to my story after a while that I was forced to tell the other person that I had to go.
Based on both of our skewed personas, it was apparent that we were following O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Model because we used the communication technology of chatrooms to regulate our self-presentation to another person. It was very important for us to stick to our story by using much clearer than ambiguous statements or else the other person could have detected our deception. Thus, the learn medium of chatrooms worked in our favor.
I'm not surprised at how easy it was to role play in this environment. A nineteen year-old who calls himself "badboy" is probably very eager to believe that an eighteen year-old attractive California girl wants to chat with him. Of course, he could have suspected something by the quick change of age from twenty four to eighteen but perhaps he didn't want to say anything that might jeopardize his chatting.
Strange that more of us didn't try the deception option for this assignment. It is amazing to see how easy it is to deceive in the digital realm. The Social Distance Theory (which suggests that a leaner medium is more conducive to lying,) makes a lot of sense to me and I see it in practice all the time. Face-to-face and richer media makes it more difficult to lie because of non-verbal cues and assessment signals which cannot be hidden. This couldn't be more evident than in identity-based deception where the physical becomes a matter of self-description, not observation.
Hey Saurin, so I must say that they way you phrased everything and told your story was really clear and seemed to hit the nail right on the head. I really liked how you decided to use the fact that CMC is an example of lean media to your advantage and the font, topic choice, as well as sn I thought was very cleaver. Interestingly, as I read your article, I found myself wondering if badboy482 was actually a bad boy just like you were "blue for you." I am curious as to whether you were successful in using the nonverbal cues to be able to portray your personality, true or not, in the same way that he was able to express himself. However, that's just me wondering whether people choose their screen names to represent themselves or just as an attention getting device. Anyways, really cool story, definitely gave me some great insight!
It's amazing how easily we are manipulated when there is a lack of cues, and even when there isn't. Humans seem to want to believe anything that is thrown at them making the internet quite an intriguing area. Even in your case, where you changed your age mid-conversation, it seems that "badboy" was quickly drawn into the fact that you were an "18 year old college girl from cali." It reminds me of social engineering and the ease at which human error can be the downfall of an entire security system. Badboy wanted you to be an 18 year old from Cali so much that changing your age might have even made him buy into your story more. The internet provides a medium that makes it surprisingly easy to just use “pink, Comic Sans MS font” and become someone which we are not. Whether it is through unconscious self-presentation, or conscious manipulative lying, the ease at which it is believed is almost scary.
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