11 | Meeting a Computer Genius

Over the summer I was approached by a small corporation looking for programmers to help develop a startup social networking site. For privacy reasons, I’ll call the person who contacted me “John.” He sent me a few emails outlining the basics of the project and we talked on instant messenger as well. We both talked about our respective experiences and seemed to have the same expertise in complimentary fields within web development. From this impression I trusted that he chose a successful startup to work for and recruit me to join. Within a few days I met his team for a face-to-face presentation, learning further specifics behind the idea and implementation. Despite my positive virtual impression of this corporation, I found their business plan and professionalism severely lacking. John was at a loss for an implementation strategy and asked me for ideas instead. I expected him to be much more on top of things from our online discussions. For fun, I patronized the idea a few days to hear more of their “brilliant” ideas, until John finally caught on to my cynicism and terminated our partnership.

The hyperpersonal theory best explains how I formed such inconsistent impressions of John. Online, we talked about general programming practices, from which I extrapolated that he also had a good hold on practical implementations. Behavioral confirmation also played a role in my impression. Before I interacted with John, I hoped that he was a true genius and that I might be working for such a great group. Before interacting with him, I expected him to know a lot about programming, which he initially did and caused me to be more impressed and reinforce his knowledge. Therefore, by focusing on such a limited subject matter and already holding high exceptions, I allowed a limited amount of evidence to push my impression of him to a high extreme, providing a bloated impression.

Our online interaction was definitely short-term, lasting only a few days. Hypothesis 3 of the Ramirez study predicts that our FtF interaction should have been evaluated more positively and provide more uncertainty reduction. Our meeting reduced uncertainty, but not in a good way! Thus, I believe the problem lies in the uncertainty reduction theory. Although I agree that reducing uncertainty makes someone more attractive to interact with, in this case its effect was minimal and outweighed by the new information I learned at the meeting. Additionally, the modality switch caused me to forget about the online impression and focus only on our meeting. To be fair, this was more of a business than personal relationship, and may explain why my experience differed from those in the Ramirez study.

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