anybody met Mr. Crimson?

[ute4ever]

I think RaiderUte kicked his butt a year or so ago, man that Mr C sure is a pansy for someone with such a big mouth online.

[Archaea]

for Long Beach State? Do I err?

[ute4ever]

Yeah you err, the only thing he played was Tecmo Super Bowl

[OhioBlue]

Originally Posted by UtahDan

I would be interested in reading that. Can you email it to me? Thanks.

I looked for the paper last night and couldn't find it either in hard copy form or on my electronic files. I went back and perused the few pieces of literature I keptl. My paper was an assignment in social psych 550 to write a proposal, not one that we needed to carry through with but potentially could.

My idea involved the well-documented research finding that people tend to like people online more than face to face...and when they meet them face to face there is often a disappointment factor and the rating goes down a bit. It's a projection of ideals onto someone for whom there are no nonverbal clues or what they call "gating features"--observable stuff that we pay lots of attention to in FTF interaction but obviously not online. Well I was interested to replicate that finding but also test the other angle, the converse. Meaning, would it also hold true that people who dislike others online tend to project negative qualities that when confronted with an actual face to face experience, they find themselves unable to justify. Obviously the popular hypothesis would be yes, but social psych research often has an interesting way of illuminating things you wouldn't think about or predict. So I was going to use a mixture of internet sports board users....set some parameters around length of time on the boards, there were a couple rating scales used in previous research I was going to use, and then survey post-hoc those people who have subsequently met people from the boards, or I was playing around with the idea of surveying people at a board tailgate after they've met posters for the first time.

Does that make sense?

I did find some of the literature I cited and can give you some mildly interesting bullet points regarding internet interaction:

--as I said above, several studies have shown that in FTF meeting versus online meeting, the online interaction produces greater intimacy and closeness. Note: I'm talking about a controlled study with just one interaction, and then a rating of closeness at the end of that interaction. I'm not suggesting, nor was this article, that we stop altogether interacting with people in person.

--Main reason for this (which has implications for how much you can learn about a person from their posts over time) is that people tend to portray their "actual selves" in person, the version they tend to be in such social interactions. Whereas online, people tend to portray their "true selves" or those aspects of themselves that they would like to believe really define them, but often withhold in social settings due to convention, appropriateness, risk, etc. "...both because one is free of the expectations and constraints placed on us by those who know us, and because the costs and risks of social sanctions for what we say or do are greatly reduced" (Bargh, et al, 2002).
From same article, "Those who interacted on the Internet liked one another significantly more (M = 5.55) than did those who interacted in person (M = 3.05)."

--"...people are cognizant of the fact that they are one type of person in social settings but contain within them relatively unexpressed qualities and interpersonal abilities (e.g., being witty, bratty, aggressive) that they would like to but feel unable to present to others (i.e., the 'true self'). (Bargh et al 2002)

--Researchers found a significant and substantial correlation between degree of liking for someone on the internet and the tendency to project attributes of an ideal friend onto that person. This same tendency did not occur in face to face interations in this particular study.

--"Believing that one's partner possesses such idealized qualities also has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy; it is well-established that treating one's partner with such expectations and assumptions has the effect of producing those very behaviors and qualities" (Bargh, et al, 2002). Here is where what I call the “Goatnapper Phenomenon” comes to mind. Ever notice how, when people feel compelled to introduce a bit of humor into their post, they just make some reference to Goat? It becomes a socially-rooted phenomenon, also creating an idealized version of Kip, who is a great person in person but hardly the uber-phenomenon he is on the board.

--On the issue of ‘inside jokes’ and other group-level influences (apparent on any and all of the forums I visit); “…anonymous internet settings do not so much ‘deindividuate’ people, causing them to lose internal, self-related controls over their behavioral impulses, as they ‘depersonalize’ them, making group aspects of identity relatively more salient and powerful as determinants of behavior” (a different study by Bargh). == group norms become even more important guides to behavior under conditions of anonymity, than they do in FTF interaction

--“…while CMC [computer-mediated communication] ineractants are making more attributions from fewer absolute cues, they are efficiently accommodating to the medium by deploying more intimately personal cues” (Tidwell & Walther, 2002).

--From same article, participants were found to attain significantly greater increase in attributional confidence in a single online exchange than those in a FtF condition. Granted, these results are mediated by the variable of motivation—that is, in this study it appears people wanted to get to know one another. On cougarboard and utefans, I’m quite sure that isn’t always the case.

--from same study: individuals in CMC interaction tended to hyperpersonalize, leading to increased confidence in attributions

--McKenna et al from New York University; also had some expertise in the area when I reviewed the literature.

there was more, but I can't recall the interesting stuff. Particularly there were some things I read that had clear implications for internet forums and chat rooms, and the group dynamics of people's interactions. So that was way more than you wanted, but since I went to the (enjoyable) trouble to refresh my memory, I'll post it all here for you.

[JazzyUte]

Archaea, your icon over on the left makes me think impure thoughts.

[Archaea]

convert to BYU, or become a lawyer, where all your thoughts are impure, so it won't matter.

[Pampas Coug]

I agree, Archaea, your avatar is indecent. Mine is likely BYU-approved swimwear (okay, hips cut a little too high, but otherwise....). It's just that all swimwear looks better on some people than on others.

:lol:

[il Padrino Ute]

almost doesn't look real. She looks more like a Barbie doll.

There is no doubt that the woman which is Archaea's avitar is human.

[Archaea]

not that that person would ever have been me, but in a former life, I would have dreamt being so.

[ute4ever]

How can a thread that began discussing Mr. Crimson evolve into one about babes? It just feels so.....wrong.