This interdisciplinary research project will examine the ways in which the media used by people to communicate with each other may alter perceptions of themselves and others, thereby reshaping interpersonal dynamics among those individuals. The project will focus on analyses of changing interpersonal dynamics as a result of the use of online technologies for identifying and making direct contact with others. This project will advance basic understanding of how popular online systems affect people's perceptions about technology, relationships, and themselves as well as how these perceptions affect behavior. The project will enhance knowledge about the ways that technology affects relational decision making and interpersonal behavior. It also will provide new insights regarding the ways that online systems designed to facilitate interpersonal contact impact the self-concepts of the people who use them, and it may provide new information and insights that can facilitate improvements to the design of popular forms of social computing technology. Although this project focuses on one form of online interpersonal communication, project findings will provide more generalizable insights regarding the complex interactions between communications media and the content of communications as well as their impact on communicators in many other contexts.
The investigators will integrate perspectives and approaches from communication, psychology, and information science to develop a new research approach focusing on the development and testing of a source multiplicity, attribution, recognition, and transformation model of online interaction. This new modeling approach will represent a paradigmatic shift in the way that such forms online interaction is investigated, in part because it draws on research conducted by scientists across disparate fields. The investigators will use scientific experiments, participant interviews, and behavioral measurements to investigate answers to the following types of questions: (1) How do people evaluate information communicated by algorithmic and human sources when making attributions within online systems? (2) Do people recognize how technology influences their decisions and attributions in the online communication process? (3) Given that online platforms produce a wealth of feedback to participants, how do these kinds of information from others and from the online system itself create feedback loops that affect individuals' self-concept? The investigators will assess how online systems influence multiple facets of human behavior, including formation of new relationships, information processing, decision making, interpersonal judgments/attributions, and self-perception. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.
