Relationships- Virtual Relationships

Question 1

virtual relationships in social media:

Answer 1

its now common to develop relationships by communicating through social media. Psychologists are interested why online relationships seem to disclose more and develop intimacy sooner than in real life.

Question 2

Absence of Gating Mechanisms:

Answer 2

Communicating through the internet removes a number of factors that normally act as filters or barriers stopping interactions in face to face encounters. Barriers such as level of physical attractiveness, speech defects, age group or being from a different social or ethnic background

Question 3

Reduced Cue theories:

Answer 3

computers lack some of the features of face to face communication such as non verbal communication ie facial expressions. This may result in people reading too much/ what they want into typed communication.

Question 4

Anonymity:

Answer 4

Deindividuation results in a reduction of feelings of responsibility, leading to a loss of inhibition, individuals can say things online that they never would in real life. This lack of the normal distancing behaviours that face-to-face interactions are normally regulated lead to feelings of closeness and intimacy but also behaviours like sexting and trolling

Question 5

hyperpersonal model (Walther 1996):

Answer 5

People can manipulate their online identity signiticantly and control interactions to display a hyper honest, or hyper dishonest version of themselves.

Question 6

Examples of Gate

Answer 6

Attractiveness
Physical Disability
Stammer
Shyness
Age
Ethnicity

Question 7

CMC

FTF

Answer 7

CMC = Computer Mediated Communication

FTF = Face to Face Communication

Question 8

Absence of gating in CMC (Virtual relationships)

Answer 8

These gates can remain hidden
This allows self disclosure and intimacy to develop
Then the gate may be revealed but because of the self disclosure it doesn’t matter as much
now

Question 9

Yurchisin et al (2005)

Answer 9

Interviewed 11 online daters and found that these individuals tended to give accounts of both their real and better selves in dating profiles as a way of attracting potential partners.
Some interviewees even admitted that they would steal another daters ideas or copy peoples images as a way of making themselves more popular.
Yurchisin did however find that most online identities were still close to the person’s true identity in order to avoid unpleasant surprises in real life encounter

Question 10

Smith and Duggan 2013) New research on online dating

Answer 10

In a large scale national survey of over 2000 American participants, found the use of online dating is becoming more acceptable. With 53% of people agreeing that “online dating allows people to find a better match for themselves because they can get to know a lot more people”. With the biggest reasons for using online dating being meeting people who share similar hobbies (60%), and beliefs and values (52%).
However 54% of internet daters felt like someone else seriously misrepresented themselves in their profile

This suggests both that people see the internet as a way to overcome fliters/gates by meeting more people.
That they are able to get to know them well through self disclosure of personal interests. But also others are able to take advantage of the hyperpersonal model by producing a dishonest version of themselves.

Question 11

McKenna and Bargh (2000)

Answer 11

who demonstrated both that people were able to express themselves more online and after two years the 70% of relationships that formed online survived, compared to 50% relationships that start in the real world.