I asked my good friend, let’s call her Kate, to rank her Facebook profile elements on a scale of 1 (completely inaccurate) to 5 (completely accurate):
Activities: 4
Favorite music: 5
Favorite movies: 5
Favorite books: 5
Favorite quotes: 5
About me: 5
Unlike her absolutely accurate email address, school, name, relationship status, and gender that she lists on her profile, the signals listed above are low-cost conventional signals. She could easily have changed her interests and activities but would have had trouble lying about assessment signals like gender and email.
I asked her to elaborate on how often she does the activities listed as equal elements on her Facebook profile. Her response did match my all of expectations of her, and the activities she listed as equal activities did not have similar emphasis:
tennis: a month ago (how often- every few months)
listening to music: 5 minutes ago (how often- every day)
sleeping: last night (how often- every night)
bikeriding: a few weeks ago (how often- every few weeks)
cards: 6 months ago (how often- rarely)
wiffle ball: a month ago (how often- every summer)
swimming: 2 months ago (how often- rarely)
walking around on nice days: a week ago (how often- every week)
The results of my experiment coincide with those of Catalina’s study. Lies were very subtle, and ratings ranged from 4-5. However, the results of the Facebook experiment are not as surprising as Catalina’s; people see and interact with many of their Facebook friends every day in person, whereas those on dating websites have usually not yet met in person. I would have expected people to lie much more often on dating websites. However, both instances make sense in light of the self-presentation goals of Goffman and Baumeister. In both cases there is the anticipation of meeting the profile viewer in real-life, which urges people to make their profiles more accurate and insert only subtle lies, which could end up having an exaggerated effect.
She also stated that she is more hesitant to add or change information rather than delete it altogether. Due to the recordability aspect of profiles discussed by Goffman and Baumeister, Kate would appear dishonest if she were to completely revise her activities or favorite music. But if she were to remove those items altogether, no harm would be done. Overall, the asynchronous medium of Facebook allows Kate to lie subtly and frequently, which supports Goffman and Baumeister’s theory.
Personally, I leave all the fields which require conventional signals blank, aside from being too lazy to keep updating my favorite movies and music, I feel that my personality would be skewed and exaggerated depending on what I emphasize (both knowingly and unknowingly). This notion touches on the reduced-cues aspect of the Goffman and Baumeister in that I am concerned that limited profile information would exaggerate inaccurate impressions of my personality.
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3 comments:
Hey Alon!
Great Post! I really liked that you started it out with a little research you did with your friend about the accuracy of their profile. When you discussed the issue of their activities being slightly less accurate I would say that from the frequency reports that you were given about a 3 would be more representative. I say this because in the activity list Kate has got activities that she rarely ever does. This strikes me immediately as the SIDE Theory. The social identity / deindividuation theory is a concept that people can have a selective self presentation online. Such as Kate choose what activities she wanted to use to represent herself. However, how does card playing represent a significant part of her life when she hasn't played in 6 months and only does so rarely? Since she only listed about 7 activities, card playing clearly is not an accurate display of self interest because it is not on her top 7 most frequently done activities. There has definitely been some interesting self-presentation manipulation that I think would have been very interesting to try and delve into if this was a conscious decision or not.
Interesting post, Alon. Another thing to keep in mind is that the activities section of facebook is rarely updated. While I'm sure that there are people who update their activities regliously, I would guess that for most that section is filled out sometime soon after account creation and then never updated. So there is self presentation, but it is not constantly being updated. This can also affect whether people are “lying” through their activities. It's possible that when the field was originally filled out, Kate had just played wiffle ball but now she's hesitant to remove that activity because others may notice and that could negatively impact their perception of her. So the permanency of profiles and the fact that the news feed picks up when you modify favorite books, movies, etc have self presentation effects as well. So things that originally weren't lies could, over time become subtle lies. Then the facebook user has a self presentation question, keep the subtle lie or remove it and appear mercurial.
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