I chose, for my target of study, a member of the Yahoo! Messenger Movies chat room that went by the screen name of Slugworth. At first I attempted to engage Slugworth in a one-on-one conversation, so I could get to know them better and form my impression. However, this proved to be more or less impossible, as Slugworth enjoyed passing the time in the chat pointing out to nobody in particular how stupid everyone was. Just about any opinion about a movie, or even a general comment offered by the rest of the chat room was immediately rebuked by Slugworth as both moronic and ignorant. Surely he was the only true authority regarding movies.
After observing this Slugworth for about twenty minutes, I felt confident I had a good grasp on their general personality. The first and strongest opinion I formed about Slugworth is that he was undoubtedly male and just as undoubtedly a teenager. At least in my mind, only an adolescent male could exhibit the degree of generalized antipathy I saw in Slugworth. Furthermore, I believed that he was something of a loner in real life, and that the behavior he was exhibiting in a chat room (the ultimate haven of anonymity) was just his general skulking attitude taken to a whole new level. In the safety of the chat room, he did not hesitate to inform anyone and everyone how stupid they all were. It seemed to me that he was definitely the kind of person who in school would sit alone in the back and smirk inside about just how inferior all his classmates were, if only because they didn’t realize how smart he was.
Looking back, it was really interesting how quickly I dismissed Slugworth as just some maladjusted kid that had the youthful “I hate everyone” mentality. He, of course, must have scored low in terms of Openness, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. But when writing about this, and thinking about what we discussed in class, my opinions definitely fall under the umbrella of the Hyperpersonal Model. I was so sure of my diagnosis of Slugworth’s personality and yet I had only been able to observe him in a very limited space for about twenty minutes. It was definitely weird to experience that increased intensity that the Model predicts, especially because I’ve probably done it hundreds of times before without even realizing it.
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It's interesting how upon reading his screen name, you could immediately tell that he was male. In a way, the screen name has become a physical attribute that we are able to process instantaneously. In my chatroom experience, I too was able to form an instant impression on gender and sometimes age and race, all from the user name.
When it comes to observing people, I feel like it is easier to form impressions according to the Hyperpersonal model, where the impressions are more exaggerated, especially for the people who are extraverted, or in this case, outwardly moronic. At least he is giving you something to base your impression off. For people who are more conscientious, they become plain in the sense that they do not display many cues. As a result, our impression of them is more neutral and probably follows more closely to the CFO Perspective.
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