The Chilly Internet
The cues people use to form some impression of your warmth are mainly nonverbal. Your facial expressions can be a giveaway: a scowl is all your observers need to take your measure. Your vocal patterns, body posture, gestures, and eye contact will also tip the scales toward one end of the warm/cold continuum. Folding your arms and looking away will lead to a cold impression, while moving a little closer when your partner speaks will make you seem warmer. Research on nonverbal communication and its role in impression formation is very extensive, and there is no question that your words - what you actually say - take a back seat to other cues when observers are drawing conclusions about warmth and coldness.
In many corners of the Internet, your typed words take center stage and observers have little more than ASCII characters to take your temperature. Much of the early research on socioemotional expression online, the kind that leads to impressions of a person's warmth or coldness, showed that we all seem cooler, more task-oriented, and more irascible than we might in person. In the 1970s, Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff conducted one of the first studies to compare the way people express themselves in computer-mediated and face-to-face meetings, and their results did not bode well for this youthful medium. They analyzed utterances in the two settings and found that the face-to-face groups expressed more agreement with one another. The simple "uh-huhs" that a person uses to show understanding and agreement with the speaker were far less common in the online meeting. This isn't too surprising - it would seem odd to type an utterance like that, but perfectly natural to say it. What was more surprising was that the computer-mediated groups made more remarks to express disagreement and fewer remarks that might relieve a tense situation. It sounds like they were getting on each others' nerves and acting in ways that made it worse rather than better. Those differences would easily account for the chilly impressions.
Many people have at least a passing acquaintance with the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) personality test. Rodney Fuller, a researcher at Bellcore who investigates human-computer interfaces, used a similar but shorter test derived from the MBTI to learn more about online impression formation, and found that mistakes about warmth and cold ness were common. He asked people to identify someone they had never met in person, but with whom they communicated on the Internet, to take this brief test - but not with their own answers. He told them to put themselves into the shoes of their email partner and answer the questions as they thought the other person might. The colleagues, or targets, also completed the test, but they answered for themselves. As a control, people who knew one another face-to-face also completed the test, with one member of each pair playing the role of the other.
How well could the role players guess how their colleagues would answer the questions? The ones who had the advantage of face-to-face contact did reasonably well, but the email-only partners showed some intriguing misperceptions. They thought their partners preferred the logical and analytical "thinking" approach far more than they actually did, and they underestimated the possibility that many of them would prefer a more people-oriented "feeling" approach. The targets' need for structure and order, at the expense of spontaneity, was also overestimated by the role players who only knew them through the wires.
Together, these two studies show that what we type is not quite what we would say in person, and others react to this subtle alteration in our behavior. We don't just appear a little cooler, testier, and disagreeable because of the limitations of the medium. Online, we appear to be less inclined to perform those little civilities common to social interactions. Predictably, people react to our cooler, more task-oriented impression and respond in kind. Unless we realize what is happening, an escalating cycle begins. The online group members could have typed simple phrases to express more agreement and to release tension if they had realized the importance of such utterances to the impression they were making and to the group's functioning. They could have softened their typed verbal disagreements, with "Oh, not sure I quite agree with that," as they might have done in person. Though their emotional intelligence might have been high in real life, it was less acute online.In the 1970s when this technology was very new, we were struggling just to get our point across and get something done. Over the years, though, our lingering doubts about the harsh, cold-fish impression we seemed to be making online have led to some imaginative experiments. Intuitively, people began to appreciate the need to make adjustments in the way they conveyed feeling.
