e-Perceptions
A Study of Personality Impressions Based on Personal Websites
Sam Gosling, Ph.D. Simine Vazire
What is this study about?
The goal of this study is to examine how people form impressions of others based on their personal websites. When you look at someone's website, you make judgments about them without knowing anything else about them. Likewise, when people look at your personal website, they make judgments about you. Are these judgments accurate? What messages do personal websites convey about their authors? What personality characteristics can we accurately deduce from websites?
Why are we doing this study?
Most research in person perception (how we form impressions of other people) has focused on face-to-face interactions in impression formation. Little research has examined the many other contexts in which we form impressions of others such as their living environments (e.g., bedrooms), their clothing, or, in this case, their personal websites. In our previous research (Gosling et al., 2001) we found that people could make accurate judgments of certain aspects of other people's personality simply by looking at their bedrooms or office spaces. In this study, we define personality broadly and include such elements as traits, abilities, values, preferences, etc.. The findings from our research are important to the field of person perception because they will show whether we can make accurate judgments of a target's personality even when the target is not present. More generally, this research extends previous research in this field to everyday contexts that have been overlooked, such as websites and offices.
Contact Information
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Simine
Vazire
Department
of Psychology
University
of Texas at Austin
Austin,
TX 78712