'Net Psychology - Honours Thesis?

[Zerok]

Tagline: Will NG become part of an internet psychology study? Read on!

This coming school is my last year for my undergraduate degree, and I'll be conducting an honour's thesis as part of my degree requirement. Over the summer I have to formulate, design, justify and draft ethics forms (for submission in September) for my idea(s).

One thing I've always wanted to do is a study on internet psychology. This is a very broad and largely undefined topic, so I'd have to narrow it wayyyy down and stick to a specific idea. Now before I say anything else, I might not do it on 'netpsych (a term I've just coined right now) but there is certainly a possibility.

I've also considered integrating NG somehow. A few years ago I used a game from this site do a study for a research course (Marvin Spectrum, go check it out).

The purpose of this topic is not chiefly to gather ideas (but feel free to submit 'em), but just to sort of chronicle the process, whether it blooms to fruition or chokes and dies out. I don't know how or if I'd be using NG, if I'd be getting users to do stuff as part of the research, getting participants to do something on NG, or both.

Let me tell you what I consider 'netpsych to actually be, then maybe you'll have a better idea of what direction I'm considering going in. Basically, it's the study of mental processes (non-biological, largely) that relate to the way we interact with each other online, the way we interpret the internet and/or how our offline and online worlds coexist, intermingle, etc.

Example ideas:

I've always been sort of fascinated by the concept of an 'online' or 'internet' personality, and how or if that relates to someone's 'offline' or 'real' personality. A study that looked for parallels between the two might be interesting, if it's not already been done. For example, someone may act like an idiot on these boards but be an average kid otherwise. Anonymity (a subject that has been extensively researched) obviously plays a role in that, but what else, and how so?

Or perhaps you've wondered why sites like 4chan or games like WoW inspire such followings... is it due to their demographic? If so, is it because the people's offline or online personalities, or both? Maybe it's a cultural thing.

Why/how do people become grammar nazis?

What kinda things about the internet would YOU like science to try and settle? And how could science use NG to do so?

Now, since this is an honours thesis, I'll have to do more than a simple experimental study with one manipulation... the goal(s) of the study will have to go beyond the simple 'what' and at least take an honest stab at fettering out the 'how,' but I won't (and can't, really) expect people causally reading this thread to try and pitch in on that effort. But I'll gladly brainstorm basic ideas here.

In summary, I'd really enjoy somehow integrating NG into a big official honours thesis, if it's viable. I dunno what publication rights it would have, but I'd see if I could get a finished result put up here if it does go all the way through.

[Sk8erGirl14]

Seems interesting, you can interview me if you wanna.

[Otto]

Read my mind.

[Pounce]

I'm all in

[goldenmoon]

If you need a guinea pig, I am your man

BLUEHIPPO=PHIT

[NimbleElephant]

This sounds like an awesome idea. I'm looking to go into psychology next year when I go to college, so I'd be interested to hear the results. I'm willing to be a participant if you need one.

[Mr-Contradiction]

This makes me even more glad that I went into Engineering.

[Zerok]

Using users here (or anyplace where the public can mass online) for reliable data would be a huge hurdle, for obvious reasons. Just by posting this thread here means I've introduced a possible demand characteristic (i.e. you'd likely KNOW that whatever I was doing to you involved a scientific test, and if the thread fills up with ideas, you might have an idea which one I'm using).

That being said, I'm probably NOT going involve the forums in any overt way.

[TJ]

Are you going to be interviewing users for your thesis?

[IammeoramI]

I'm willing to take anything in for the name of science, (and maybe twelve bucks)

[gumOnShoe]

Its a very interesting idea and I always thought you were a psych major. I'm dating one, so it just made sense with your personality. (Yes you all have personality types, its generally the way you approach and treat other people.) Anyhow, I'd be very interested in whatever you came up with.

As for newgrounds as a test resource. It sounds like it would be difficult. My girl friend's thesis was on relationships. She basicly did a survey and then a bunch of research to try and explain and analyze the results. It was interesting. Probably the most interesting result was that people were more likely to flirt with others if they were in a relationship because they had more confidence on average. For her survey she had access to all of the students who were undergraduates. It was a requirement for the classes to participate in studies in order to get so many points in the class. I almost feel that a more accessible study might involve myspace or facebook as you probably can meet plenty of those people wherever you are now.

I don't know a whole bunch about it though, so meh. Keep me posted on what you're doing, I'm certainly interested and I definately think you've got a topic here that could use more exploration.

One thing that I talked about in abnormal pscychology once with a professor, who actually had never heard about it, are the shock sites and whatnot that we often see on the internet. We had been talking about exibitionism and associated disorders where people would flash people for the reaction. Our professor claimed they would flash another person to confirm that they were actually male. I asked why a person on the internet would show a disturbing video when he might never see the reaction, and pretty much puzzled my professor and we moved on.

So yeah, I always thought there was a lot of room for studying. Shock sites, online bullying, you name it its out there.

"Bylaw 34". There is a disorder of it on the internet.

[Damian]

Maiden....wtf.

[Kidlazarus]

I got what you need. Be it an interview, completion of a mental exercise or satanic ritual.

[yfor4]

You dont know me.... YOU DONT KNOW ME AT ALL

[HeartbreakHoldout]

At 7/10/08 02:30 PM, TJ wrote: Are you going to be interviewing users for your thesis?

Like anyone getting interviewed would act in a natural sort of way. It's like, the only way to observe someone acting naturally is without telling them that they're being observed.

[TJ]

At 7/10/08 02:37 PM, HeartbreakHoldout wrote:

At 7/10/08 02:30 PM, TJ wrote: Are you going to be interviewing users for your thesis?

Like anyone getting interviewed would act in a natural sort of way. It's like, the only way to observe someone acting naturally is without telling them that they're being observed.

Of course there would be a lot of people who can seriously give an interview. Not every study has to be blind for it to be legit. Anyway, it is up to him to provide conclusion to the results he gets from interviews if he does conduct them.

[Zerok]

At 7/10/08 02:33 PM, gumOnShoe wrote: Its a very interesting idea and I always thought you were a psych major. I'm dating one, so it just made sense with your personality. (Yes you all have personality types, its generally the way you approach and treat other people.)

Well if you're dating one, that approach can't be too evil or standoffish, I hope. ;)

As for newgrounds as a test resource. It sounds like it would be difficult.

Indeed it would. A challenge, mayhap?

My girl friend's thesis was on relationships. She basicly did a survey and then a bunch of research to try and explain and analyze the results. It was interesting. Probably the most interesting result was that people were more likely to flirt with others if they were in a relationship because they had more confidence on average.

That is kind of cool. Did she have a good statistical outcome?

For her survey she had access to all of the students who were undergraduates. It was a requirement for the classes to participate in studies in order to get so many points in the class.

Same here, 'cept I'll have access to student pools from two universities, since my supervisor is at a different school.

I almost feel that a more accessible study might involve myspace or facebook as you probably can meet plenty of those people wherever you are now.

Possibly. It all completely depends on what I'm looking at, of course. For pure human resources, I'll have the student pool. NG or other sites will probably not be a principle resource for actual participants, but they may be part of the manipulation (e.g. participants spend 15 mins browsing SA forums versus NG forums, after I establish some sort of difference between the two via the board members or something, savvy?)

I don't know a whole bunch about it though, so meh. Keep me posted on what you're doing, I'm certainly interested and I definately think you've got a topic here that could use more exploration.

There's actually a whole journal dedicated to computing and psychology out there, and it's mostly free to access. I'll have to find it and link it here. If I do end going ahead on this, I'll likely be reading a shitload of articles from it.

One thing that I talked about in abnormal pscychology once with a professor, who actually had never heard about it, are the shock sites and whatnot that we often see on the internet. We had been talking about exibitionism and associated disorders where people would flash people for the reaction. Our professor claimed they would flash another person to confirm that they were actually male. I asked why a person on the internet would show a disturbing video when he might never see the reaction, and pretty much puzzled my professor and we moved on.

So yeah, I always thought there was a lot of room for studying. Shock sites, online bullying, you name it its out there.

"Bylaw 34". There is a disorder of it on the internet.

Internet bullying and its parallels to real life bullying would be an interesting venture, and I'm positive there's already a lot of good studies concerning it. The trick would be doing a lit search and finding a new angle.

As for shock videos... I do have to fly this by ethics and I'm pretty sure using them would be frowned upon. But you never know.

I intend to keep this thread updated as I hone my ideas, so stay tuned.

-------------

As for interviewing folks... probably not.

Not for the reasons of 'acting unnaturally,' but because turning interview responses into usable data is a huuggggeee undertaking, not to mention that we'd have to do it IM style (voice-chat wouldn't have enough participants, methinks), which throws a confound into the whole shebang... it comes back to "how would this person have responded if they were talking to a person as opposed to some words on the screen"?

Interviewing might come in handy for really rough, estimated data, like if I wanted to generate some basic differences between the users here and the users on SA's forums. Maybe. Thing is, users HERE know that I'm doing a study, probably are familiar with me as a user/mod, whereas SA users wouldn't give two shits, and THAT might cause issues.

[Prinzy2]

Sounds interesting.

At 7/10/08 02:19 PM, Zerok wrote: Anonymity (a subject that has been extensively researched) obviously plays a role in that, but what else, and how so?

I'd say the lack of physical confrontation has a little bit to do with it. It's easy to lip off anyone if you know they won't be breaking your nose.

Or perhaps you've wondered why sites like 4chan or games like WoW inspire such followings... is it due to their demographic?

I don't play online game anymore, but when I did, it was because people I know introduced me to them. Archmage was one of my favorite games, even though it didn't have any kind of characters. It's kind of like playing Civilization without characters.

If so, is it because the people's offline or online personalities, or both? Maybe it's a cultural thing.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean.

Why/how do people become grammar nazis?

I get a little irritated when people don't double space after a period or capitalize. It's hard to concentrate if there isn't some sort of established system. It's the same concept when choosing a font for a book. They choose something block for the title so you take a little longer to read it, and then they choose a font with tails for the story because it's easier for your eyes to continue the motion.
If half the people used leet speak and shitty grammar, and half used proper grammar. There would be a lot of confusion when the leet speakers typed a lengthy post.

Also, mein grammer ist gooder :P

What kinda things about the internet would YOU like science to try and settle? And how could science use NG to do so?

I'd like to see how online bullies get treated in real life. Are they bullies in real life, cool kids, or are they bullied?

[Jezuz]

I know that Newgrounds changes my posting habits throughout the internet. For example, for awhile I was really happy with Newgrounds, felt like a good site, so I was generally a nice guy online. Then, something turned that made me hate the site slightly, and now I'm a dick all across the internet. Shame, really.

Weird thing is, I'm much happier in real life since I've started being an ass online. It's almost like a part of me I was bottling up in real life is allowed to be released online, so I can continue to be my shy, introverted self in real life. No idea why you'd care, just a strange phenomena.

[Thracian]

weird

[1-2-3]

It in "theory", is probably not a very hard subject to find a solution to. Most people on the internet do what they do so they can try to see if anyone finds them funny or just straight out want attention and want to be talked about. It is where kids can get away from being "average" and be singled out from the crowd. As for the grammar nazis, its either because the person has really terrible spelling, which anyone hates. Or its because someone either disagrees with their argument and looks for a flaw, or is insecure about themselves and try to find a fault in others. But of course, thats just what I basically think of the situation.

[LiquidSapphire]

I can answer one thing, I'm a grammar nazi cause when you get used to typing shitty, later you have to type a school project or something and it'll be hard for you to type correctly and you have to. Plus, typing in good grammar makes you look better.

Also, I have this talent on the internet, I can tell what age the person is, I've been right so many times about guessing a person's age, I just talked to that person for less than a day or a few days, and there, I can guess how old that person is. I can also tell gender most of the time.

[Zerok]

At 7/10/08 03:40 PM, Jezuz wrote: just a strange phenomena.

Freud's catharsis theory in action. 'Course there could be a third variable, allllways gotta watch for 'em.

At 7/10/08 04:04 PM, 1-2-3 wrote: It in "theory", is probably not a very hard subject to find a solution to. Most people on the internet do what they do so...

See, you're just gushing out a flurry of hindsight biases. The idea here is to take a scientific approach. There's actually no way you could possibly know why "most people on the internet do what they do;" even if you had a research article to cite you'd still just be offering support.

But of course, thats just what I basically think of the situation.

Indeed. Research is a whole different world than "people do this because X, duh."

At 7/10/08 04:05 PM, LiquidSapphire wrote: I can answer one thing, I'm a grammar nazi cause when you get used to typing shitty, later you have to type a school project or something and it'll be hard for you to type correctly and you have to. Plus, typing in good grammar makes you look better.

Yeah, but why rag on others when they type shitty?

[SHIT-TANK]

Perhaps a paper on how having literaly every source of information at your fingertips makes people desensitized as well as perhaps paranoid?

[Zerok]

At 7/10/08 06:43 PM, SHIT-TANK wrote: Perhaps a paper on how having literaly every source of information at your fingertips makes people desensitized as well as perhaps paranoid?

1) Too general. There needs to be a specific question about a specific phenomenon.
2) How would I study/design/get for data that? (You can't just use a yes/no/simple questionnaire).

However it's a good starting place for ideas (that's what brainstormin' is, right?)

Making it more specific:

If we're going to look at the internet as whole, and purely from its "information source' perspective we need to pose a psychologically relevant question. The 'desensitized' angle needs to be tightened up. We could ask people what they think it would be like to travel to far away places, and ask "how far away" that place seems and correlate the subjective answers with estimates of how long they spend on the internet every day/week/etc.

The hypothesis would be that the more time you spend on the internet, the less far away places in the world seem because of all the connectivity and reliable access to news/info around the globe.

That's not the calibre of study I'm looking for, but it's a nice platform.

Different angle:

I'm like social psychology, and an idea I've thought about is getting a group of people to maybe interact over a chat program (in separate rooms) and then get them all together in "real life" and have another interaction, or maybe vice versa, or both. It'd be hard to disguise the manipulation though, so perhaps separate groups would be chat-only and room-only...

Logistics for such a study would be a bit complex.

On that same vein, perhaps a chat room session could be initiated where a planted "spammer" or something would come in, and we could look at reactions with people by themselves, with a partner... change the nature of the spam...

Of course these two ideas are kinda working in a grounded theory approach, in that I'm designing a scenario with no question/hypothesis and hoping something interesting pops out of it. I really like idea of a controlled chat interaction setup though there are many problems:

1) Logistics (least of all, sadly).
2) Control - even if some things are controlled, a free chat environment is highly unstable as it is.
3) Data labelling - it would be hard to set up measurements that are soundly justified.
4) Data gathering - potential HOURS upon HOURS of converting long ass chat sessions into numbers for stats.

I'm hoping the literature has some good ideas to springboard off of... often a lot of the data labelling will be partially done for you too.

------

Another purpose of this thread: to help me stay focussed on getting this done. You guys help by participating (well, when you're being relevant). See, the post I quoted started a big chain of thinking.

I'll use this thread as a bank for my ideas as well, so when it comes time to email my supervisor a bunch of "possibles" all I have to do is rifle through this. Yeehaw!

[TacticalShoe]

I think it'd be fun to be a part of simply because I don't differ much between my "internet" self and my "real" self.

[Zerok]

At 7/10/08 07:30 PM, TacticalShoe wrote: I think it'd be fun to be a part of simply because I don't differ much between my "internet" self and my "real" self.

Well I can't do a case study, and your data, if it existed, would be averaged in with everyone else's.

But I guess you could compare against the average, if that's the model I used.

[Purpin]

Don't forget Purpin.

[Luxury-Yacht]

I can't think of any suggestions, but you can interview me if you want, or if you have any polls/questionnaires that you want filled out, I'll go for it.

[Luxury-Yacht]

At 7/10/08 02:48 PM, Zerok wrote:

As for interviewing folks... probably not.

Sorry, missed this bit. Nevermind, then.