Sunday Euchre

I hate losing. So naturally, as I sat in front of my computer after getting destroyed in online euchre ten to three, I was far from happy. The worst part was that I thought I had played flawlessly; it was my partner who made the wrong throws at the wrong time that had eventually cost us the game. While I am no stranger to losing, this was the first game of euchre I had played with the hidden agenda of observing my partner with the goal of forming an accurate impression.
I learned how to play euchre a long time ago, and have grown to appreciate the game for the combination of logic, luck, and social environment. Before entering the yahoo euchre room, I was doubtful that an online experience could compare with playing a face-to-face game with three of your closest friends. Despite the chat feature that allows each player to talk via CMC in a synchronous manner, things like the animated deal make games much less personal.
As the game progressed I began to develop very strong, mostly negative, opinions about my partner. She threw her cards quickly, which made her mistakes all the more aggravating because it appeared to me that she didn’t allot any time to digest the stage of the hand before choosing which card to throw. However, it did make it appear that my partner was high in conscientiousness. Her constant apologies and comments after tricks made me place her high on agreeableness scale while low on extraversion. It was difficult for me to guess how open she was to new experiences, but the mental image that I conjured of her after a twenty-minute online euchre game was one that led me to believe that she rarely left her house and substituted online euchre games for actual interactions at the face-to-face level. After a few short hands, I felt like I was no longer playing with a faceless avatar, but rather a 40 year old soft spoken divorcee who lives at home with her 2 cats (a cat was the icon she used).
After only a short time conversing via CMC, I had formed a strong, negative opinion of my subject. This could be for a lot of different reasons. Firstly, I am a very opinionated person, regardless of the communication medium. Secondly, the result of the game itself, rather than our brief conversation exchanges, could have perpetuated and in fact caused the incompetence that I attributed to my partner. However, even after taking these factors into account, I believe that the hyperpersonal model best explains my experience. While the breadth of my impression was much smaller than if I was playing with my partner in person, the intensity of my impressions were magnified and stereotyped. In this case, my impression was skewed to the negative side of the spectrum. The Cues filtered out approach is consistent with the cold communication and negative impression that I formed during my interaction. However, my experience contradicts this theory due to the fact that, despite the lack of cues, I formed a very strong opinion of my partner rather than a watered down one. Finally, I found that when making my impressions, I did not account for the deception on the part of my subject. However, due to the fact that I was engaging in impression management myself, I know that it is safe to assume that the information I was receiving through the chat could have undoubtedly led me to form an inaccurate impression.