Impression Formation

I struggled with this assignment because I found it particularly difficult to develop a relationship with a complete stranger in a chat room. Never having entered a public chat room before, I was shocked at how immature and disturbing many of the participants were. After many failed attempts to develop relationships with individuals in the various chat rooms I entered, such as ICQ’s General Chat Room, the Free College Chat Room, and countless others, I finally came across “Vexington,” on a Christianity ICQ Chat Room. I entered the Christianity Chat Room because I was confident that it would bring with it a more mature range of participants.
When I first entered the chat room, I was overwhelmed at how quickly participants were entering new information. After “Vexington,” and I exchanged superficial information about ourselves, such as our age and place of birth, he invited me into a private chat room. I was relatively shocked when he initiated a private chat room because in my earlier chat rooms, I took the more aggressive role by inviting people and on repeated occasions was called a pedophile. From this point forward, I viewed “Vexington,” whom I later learned is Steve, to be an extroverted individual. Throughout our conversation, Steve and I discussed various topics of political and religious significance. As a factory worker who was born into Christianity, and was largely uneducated, Steve displayed conservative political viewpoints. Understanding these key social factors, and hoping that Steve would become more involved in our conversation, I asked him extremely controversial religious questions. For instance, I asked him to comment on issues of gay marriage, stem cell research, and the role of religion in society. The first resounding impression that I formed about Steve was that he was definitely uneducated. I formed this impression not only based on his improper use of language and grammatical errors, but also on his curt and often times counter-intuitive responses. After asking Steve to share his views on gay marriage, for example, he began by stating gay marriage will cause the deterioration of society, to some effect. Further on, however, he stated that though adopted children of gay and lesbian couples will undoubtedly adopt their parents’ homosexuality, he agreed that sexual preference is genetically predisposed, and thus forgivable.
In addition to gay marriage, Steve and I discussed the role of religion in society at great length. Though I had difficulty following his reasoning, he was adamant in his general belief that the United States is “going downhill.” He believed that society is destroying itself mainly because of the “twists,” of modern religion, but also because of what he stated to be, “opinions, people in power, money, and the like.” After our hour-long conversation, I had formed a fairly comprehensive impression of Steve. Though our text-medium, I found him to be genuine, uneducated, relatively extroverted, slightly aggressive, and fairly close-minded. Analyzing these impressions in terms of the available theoretical perspectives on impression formation, I feel that my CMC interaction with Steve most supports the cues-filtered-out Social Presence Theory. Unlike the non-CFO perspectives, such as social-information processing theory, social identity/deindividuation theory, and the hyperpersonal theory, which collectively focus more on the cognitive aspects of impression formation, and suggest that text-mediated-communication yields more intense impressions, the Social Presence Theory hypothesizes that Computer-mediated-Communication will yield impoverished social presence due to fewer nonverbal cues. My interaction with Steve most supports this theory, for though I definitely did utilize aspects of Wahler’s Hypersonal theory, such as re-allocation of cognitive resources in forming an impression of Steve, my impression was more comprehensive and less intense than the non-CFO perspectives hypothesized. Leaving the chat room, I had a neutral and underdeveloped impression of Steve, one that definitely matches the Cues-Filtered-Out perspective.