Sultan, Lillian (1/12) Publicly anonymous: Self-presentation and identity shift in the Internet age (Gary Kose, Ph.D.; Ben Saunders, Ph.D.; Joan Duncan, Ph.D.)
The present study set out to remedy a conflation within the public commitment literature, by separately manipulating the two aspects of publicness--perceived audience and identifiability--and measuring the effect that each had on identity shift. Ninety-seven college students were assigned to self-present the trait of introversion or extroversion while completing a four-question written interview. Perceived audience was manipulated by having participants self-present on a public blog (i.e., audience condition) or in a private word document (i.e., no-audience condition). Identifiability was manipulated by asking participants to provide basic demographic information prior to completing their interview (i.e., identifiable condition), or asking that no identifying information be shared (i.e., anonymous condition). It was hypothesized that those who wrote on a blog would exhibit greater internalization of assigned trait than those who wrote in a word document, and secondarily, that among those who wrote on a blog, those who were identifiable would show greater identity shift than those who remained anonymous. Identity shift was measured using a post-test introversion-extroversion personality scale, as well as by a linguistic marker of commitment to the assigned trait. The hypotheses were not supported within the current study, although trends emerged in the hypothesized directions. As this study is the first within the public commitment literature to be conducted completely via a web-based forum, it is suggested that its failure to obtain significant results may be related to the unique social environment afforded by the Internet.
