Dr. Jeffrey T. Hancock of Cornell University’s department of communication and faculty of information science discusses deception on internet dating and social networking sites. Hancock and his collaborators have studied self-presentation and online deception for years, and have come up with some interesting findings, including when, where and how people lie online. I like that he calls profiles promises, interesting way to think about them and how we’re perceived online. I’ll be doing a podcast with Dr. Hancock in the near future.
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I think that there are many people who are used to lie in the dating site, on their progile, chat, ecc and not only on the dating site but on the IM also.
Many people use the online medium as a refuge, to be something or someone they cannot be in their real life, and this way they deceive themselves.
The research Dr. Hancock conducted over Online Dating:
* is only valid for Online Dating Sites offering speeddating proposals, Powerful Searching Engines or Matching based on Self-Reported Data – Bidirectional Recommendation Engines
* and NOT valid
for Online Dating Sites offering Compatibility Matching Algorithms.
Is very interesting to careful read the research conducted by Dr. Hancock because it explains why Serious Online Dating (serious daters = the ones who want to achieve a long term relationship with commitment or marriage) and Social Networking will never merge.
It is a big punch for sites like Gelato, Thread or others like them.
Social networking could merge with online_dating for fun, for flirting, for entertainment purposes, for instant gratification.
Social networking and online_dating for serious daters are like water and oil, they will never mix.
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\Making Sense of Strangers’ Expertise from Signals in Digital Artifacts\
\Participating in social computing technologies afford individuals the ability to perform selective self-presentation and impression management. Individuals can portray themselves through personal homepages and social networking profiles as they would like to be perceived.
While research on online profiles is clearly emerging, recent findings show that individuals quickly form impressions of personality traits of others from online profiles. The impressions formed from these profiles also appear to be accurate. Perceivers’ personality trait ratings of Facebook profiles showed some correlation with users’ own self ratings and friends’ ratings. [Extraversion was the only Big Five trait that showed evidence for meta-accuracy, \Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles\ (2007)] However, recent research also shows that there is deception involved in online profiles, raising issues of the credibility of information found online.
Conventional signals, which are common online, have attracted the most research attention. Donath looked at signaling in social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace, where one might potentially artificially inflate the number of friends to appear popular or because of the social pressure to accept friend requests. Lampe et al. looked at Facebook, another site that allows selective selfpresentation, and found that the completion of particular profile fields was a strong predictor of how many friends a student had. However, in the online world, assessment
signals could be juxtaposed with conventional signals, albeit to a lesser degree.\
In other words, browsing profiles at social networking sites, any person will assess quite well the level of Extraversion of the other persons and not well the other 4 personality traits.
\The Truth about Lying in Online Dating Profiles\ Conference of Human Interactions Proceedings Online Representation of Self April 28-May 3,2007
\
Online Dating Services
The study examined four popular online dating sites in the United States: Match.com/MSN Match.com, Yahoo Personals, American Singles and Webdate. We focused on traditional sites, where individuals create profiles and initiate contact with others, as opposed to sites that pair
users based on survey responses (e.g., eHarmony).
……………………….
The final sample included 80 participants (40 men and 40 women), of whom 45 (53.3%) were Match.com/MSN Match.com users, 29 (34.5%) were Yahoo Personals users, four were (4.8%) Webdate users, and two (2.4%) were American Singles users.\
\Deception and Design: The Impact of Communication Technology on Lying Behavior\ Conference of Human Interactions Proceedings (2004), 129-134.
Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com