Person Types and Categories

   Our cognitive miserliness emerges in the tendency to use categories and stereotypes to form impressions about people, regardless of the person's own behavior. Asch's early approach emphasized the use of cues that people themselves provide, but researchers have found that the impression you make is also the result of your observers' preconceived biases and stereotypes. We are all, in a sense, "naive scientists" who develop our own theories of human behavior based on our experiences with other people, our culture, the media, and our family traditions. We choose the speediest route we can to form an impression, even if it leads to some misperceptions and mistakes. Often, that route means pigeonholing an individual based on the person's apparent similarity to a social category that already has, in our minds, personality attributes associated with it.

   Age and gender are two categories that top the list. If I say that you are about to meet a 64-year-old woman, you already have some impression of her personality, even though I never said a single word about what she thinks or how she acts. Marilynn Brewer at UCLA showed how powerful these two categories can be when people are forming first impressions about personality. She collected 140 facial photographs of Caucasian men and women of all ages and asked her subjects to sort the photos into separate stacks that contained pictures of people they thought were similar in character. The piles nearly always contained people of the same gender and approximate age. Nevertheless, when the subjects were asked to provide verbal labels for their stacks, they rarely used age or gender as part of the description. Instead, they came up with vivid personality labels:

   "serious professionals with I-dare-you-to-challenge-my-opinion attitudes" "white collar workers who are uptight about their jobs" "Barbara Walters-types, gossipers, nosey, yet sly and slightly snobbish" "people who are persistent talkers and don't pay attention to their listeners".

   On the Internet, gender is more easily deciphered than age simply because so many people sign their messages, or use nicknames that suggest male or female. As I'll discuss in a later chapter, gender can be an especially important cue online when your acquaintances know little else about you, and this aspect of the Internet raises a number of issues about gender roles. In a professional discussion group participants rarely inquire about age, but in the social niches, the pressure to divulge age, and also gender if it isn't obvious, is relentless. We seem almost paralyzed in a social interaction until we know these two simple facts. Such interrogation would be rude in other settings, and mostly unnecessary anyway, but on the Internet it is not unusual.

   The gender question is handled through a strategic probe called MORFing on one online system. The acronym stands for Male OR female? In chat rooms, a participant with a gender-neutral nickname who joins a group as a stranger can expect two questions very early in the conversation: "How old are you?" and "Are you male or female?" These direct questions are usually asked just this baldly, though sometimes the probe may be a bit more subtle. A chatting partner might ask if you are a student, and if so, whether college or high school. The goal of these probes is to get two essential pieces of social information: your age and gender.

   On the text-based MUDs, participants can choose to describe themselves as male, female, plural, or neuter. Newcomers are assigned the neuter gender, but players can then use a special command to set it to whatever they like. Once set, the players' descriptions include the appropriate pronouns.

   Pavel Curtis, a legendary figure in the MUD world and architect of the socially oriented MUD called LambdaMOO, observes that a player's gender is one of the most important variables affecting the way other players interact with you. Players are largely male, but there is some cross-dressing and gender-swapping, mainly by men posing as female characters. Curtis, a Xerox researcher, notes that those who choose gen der neutral pronouns are pressured to reveal their true gender, and sometimes even "prove" they are what they say they are. Like other Internet users, MUD players find it disorienting to interact with someone whose gender is unknown. Partly because female players are in the minority, they may be harassed or get special treatment on the MUD:

   "One [MUD player] reported seeing two newcomers arrive at the same time, one male-presenting and one female-presenting. The other players in the room struck up conversations with the putative female and offered to show her around but completely ignored the putative male, who was left to his own devices."

   On the Web's visually rich metaworlds, where visitors can select one of many avatars provided by the software to represent themselves in interactions, any truth about age and gender could be distorted by the visual image. Ironically, these environments can be even more disorienting for impression formation than the Internet's text-based worlds, because your visual appearance has a strong impact on how others in the world react to you.

   At the entrance gate to Alpha World, I observed a milling crowd of fish-eyed aliens. With gray, scaly skin and no secondary sexual characteristics, they stumbled jerkily around like the re-animated corpses in Night of the Living Dead. Eager to escape this barren landscape, I clicked on the gate and entered a dazzling planet with fountains, pools, expanses of colorful marble surfaces, Corinthian columns, and a throng of imaginatively dressed and talkative people. Their brief utterances (typed into a chat window) appeared over their heads along with their nicknames, and the little paragraph followed them about like a balloon on a string. I watched for a few minutes, and soon my screen filled up with the face of a dark-skinned man resembling Tonto, the Lone Ranger's trusty sidekick, dressed in primitive leathers. He said, "Don't keep looking like that." "Like what?" I typed. He told me to press the Home key on my keyboard and watch.

   AlphaWorld's interface is first person; you appear to be viewing the world through your own eyes but can't see your own character. When you turn or move, the scene moves with you. My mentor's suggestion to press the Home key changed it to third-person view. I saw that my avatar was the fish-eyed alien, not the disembodied presence I assumed. Dismayed by my hideous appearance, I clicked Avatar on the menu, and randomly picked "Kelly" from a list of uninformative first names. In a microsecond, I was transformed into a copper-haired babe in purple leotards, and others began waving. One avatar asked my age, and when I replied, the next balloon read, "Yeah, and I'm 102."

   Just as in a face-to-face setting, the nonverbal cues are more important to impression formation that mere words, even when all of us know - intellectually - that an avatar is as fake as an Elvis Presley Halloween mask. Ignoring my words, he gravitated toward the impression the avatar made rather than what I said, and also his own stereotypes about the demographics of Alpha World inhabitants.