Impression Formation In a CMC Exchange

The psychological space I entered was an instant messaging exchange that lasted about thirty minutes with a person I met in an informal online gaming session. This person is a male college sophomore around the age of 20, presumably white. His social type can be deduced from his job or role, which he described as a student in software engineering at Penn State University, from which I can infer that he probably comes from a middle or upper-middle class family, that he is relatively smart or good at studying, that he is future-minded, and that he probably doesn’t get into any serious criminal trouble.

We began to talk about school, about our majors, about our mutual antipathy for math, about our future career goals and what we did over the summer. During the conversation, I was thinking that he was a very warm person and that talking to him about various topics was quite easy. However, after the conversation ended, I had re-read what he had said during the exchange and I realized that his remarks were mostly very neutral and concise, only really answering the questions that I was asking him, without trying very hard to embellish his responses with much detail. Looking back, it appears that he was not actually being as warm as I had originally thought in the impression I formed of him during the conversation, which leads to the possibility that I was over-attributing the warmth of his responses as a result of the CMC medium, which adheres to Walther’s Hyperpersonal Model.

I will now describe my impression in terms of the Big 5 Traits: I did not feel that my conversational partner was exhibiting any sort of neurosis, but was rather quite calm and collected. While speaking to him, he seemed to be extroverted, but again, after re-reading the conversation, his terse, neutral responses indicated a less extroverted personality that I had originally thought. He showed openness only to the extent that he would answer the questions that I was asking, without letting slip any substantial extraneous detail that might have initiated more in-depth conversation. Due to the limited amount of information he was giving me, the breadth of my impression suffered as a result. I was only able to form an impression based on his answers to my questions, which supports the SIP model (and therefore the Hyperpersonal Model, process #2) in that there was a developmental aspect – that the transmission of information took much longer than it would have in F2F communication. The ability to exchange social info based on adapted cues, as the SIP model suggests, was apparent in my impression. He was, however, very agreeable in that he tended to react positively to most of my comments. His degree of conscientiousness is difficult to gauge because he seemed to openly answer whatever I was asking him, however, he refrained from expanding on his answers too much, which seemed to suggest that he was carefully selecting the information he wanted to share with me. The observation that my conversational partner was exhibiting selective self-presentation seems to, again, agree with the Hyperpersonal Model.

My experience did not agree with the CFO theory. I sensed neither an underdeveloped or negative impression formation, but rather a more intense impression of certain characteristics, as I explained above. My impression was more in line with the Hyperpersonal Model and the SIP Theory mainly because it was less detailed with respect to breadth, yet more intense or exaggerated. My impression also matched many of the characteristics of the Hyperpersonal Model, such as exhibiting over-attribution processes, selective self-presentation, and a developmental aspect.