In the Brunswikian Lens Model, we make judgments about another person’s characteristics by taking whatever cues we are given in the particular environment and using them to draw conclusions the personality traits and aspects of the person. Cue validity is how accurate a particular cue is in determining a target’s traits, and cue utilization is the level to which a particular cue is used in forming an impression. When these two things occur at the same time, it is called functional achievement; we are making an accurate assessment of the other person. On a Facebook profile, if we rely on a particular interest that a person lists to make a judgment about them, and it is actually a valid interest of theirs, then we have reached functional achievement.
The individual to environment links that the Brunswikian Model explains are described through four mechanisms. In examining these I looked at the Facebook profile of my friend’s boyfriend who I have not met yet. Self-directed identity claims are made by the person for themselves. They exist to strengthen their own self-image. “Charlie” belongs to a Facebook group called “Dominican College Students – Estudiantes Dominicanos.” This group works to underline how he views himself as a Dominican student, and helps him connect with that part of his personality. Other groups about being in the Ivy League, growing up in New York City, and attending public school also serve similar functions. All these things are evident to other people through the personal information and education he lists on his profile, but being part of the group helps him reinforce it for himself. Other-directed identity claims are the parts of the profile that are fashioned to project a certain image to the people viewing the profile. He displays the “Baseball Fan” application to show his Facebook friends that he is a loyal Mets fan. Also, certain groups he is a part of aim to get some sort of message across to people, such as “Join Breast Cancer Awareness Month” or “Facebook is turning into MySpace and I’m not liking it.”
Internal behavior residue is a record of past behavior that provides cues in the current environment. On Facebook, this is seen through the News Feed and the Mini Feed. On Charlie’s profile, his Mini Feed tells me what he wrote as his status over the past 3 weeks, as well as changes to his profile and groups he has joined. I can assess the type and level of his involvement in this online community. External behavior residue is the result of activities engaged in outside of the environment, in this case, outside of Facebook. Pictures posted months ago still show up on profiles and can be cues as to how a person might act in the future. On Charlie’s profile, I can see pictures posted from a trip he took with his girlfriend to NYC a few weeks ago. They show them having a good time and being happy together. This makes me infer that they go well together and will continue to get along.
Even though I haven’t met Charlie, I have already created a fairly robust impression of him using the four mechanisms of the Brunswikian Lens. In assessing personality, neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness are the big five traits. In analyzing Charlie’s profile, I agree with Hancock and Dunham that openness and conscientiousness are the most visible traits over CMC. Charlie was very open about his likes and dislikes through his 81 groups and the interests and applications he lists on his profile. I felt he was conscientious, because although he had a wide variety of aspects of his personality and lifestyle on his profile, he did not have obvious things that could reflect negatively on him. From talking to my friend about him, I know that he goes to parties, but he is careful not to have any incriminating pictures of himself. However, his extroversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness are very difficult to judge having only looked at his Facebook profile. I would guess that he is very agreeable, slightly neurotic, and highly extroverted, but I am less confident in these than my assumptions about his openness and conscientiousness.
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2 comments:
Nanditha,
First of all thank you for commenting on my post. I did not even take into consideration which traits were apparent in my study. I actually had a theory about Hancock and Dunham. I felt that Agreeableness and Extraversion were difficult to scale in that experiment because the task that they were assigned was task-oriented. It is hard to judge a person through CMC about how social they are and how excited they get when you are both trying to get the tan grams to match up. However, in Facebook it would be easier to find this information because this is what its purpose is—social networking. The only reason that Conscientiousness was easier to judge because the task they were assigned was very methodical; I found it rather hard to judge this trait even with all the information on her profile. For openness, I am not sure if Hancock and Dunham suggests that openness was easier to judge in CMC, I thought it suggests that openness is just as easy to judge in CMC as it is in FtF, which could mean that openness could be hard to judge in general—I found this to be true in experience because I usually judge people on openness over time, even in FtF.
On the other hand, you found it easier to judge conscientiousness because you have incorporated outside information: your friend told you he went to parties and that he was careful about the pictures. However, it is true that Charlie was conscientious about his profile as a whole. You make a good point about openness: that it can also be judged by the amount of activity that he has through his groups. I never considered this. Your post was great and very well thought out. Overall I think we found the same results, that certain Facebook components are used to show the 4 traits of the Brunswikian Lens model.
Hi, Nanditha.
Your post is awesome. It's so detailed and it incorporated almost everything we learned about Brunswikian Lens Model.
However, you didn't seem to tie the parts about cue validity, cue utilization and functional achievement into your experiment. You just had the explanation of them.
And regarding the issue of functional achievement, how do we know if we used the right cues? People could be putting up false pictures and informations on facebook just to make them look good. I have a friend who puts up a profile picture that's not her own (and she uses a different picture of the same person on MSN chat too so I assume the pic is part of her online identity). So if we analyzed the wrong cues, wouldn't that throw off our conclusion of the person?
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