DHB: Large-Scale Analysis of Computer-Mediated Social Relationship

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This is a study of social relationship formation and development, on a massive scale, making use of a very large online personals website. For decades, psychologists have studied interpersonal attraction and social relationships. Yet relationship formation - the intervening process between attraction and a stable relationship - has been understudied. This is due in large part to the difficulty of recruiting study participants at this delicate stage; a dyad (pair) on a second date will not respond to a recruitment call for a couples study because, at that point, the people themselves do not know if they will become a couple. Understanding what leads to successful formation is a critical step in understanding successful relationships generally. The research will capture relationship formation at its early stages. By tracking communicating dyads before they meet in person, through their face-to-face meeting, and on to the establishment of a relationship, researchers will have access to their perceptions of each other throughout the crucial but ambiguous process of relationship formation. At each step, some dyads will dissolve - that is, some will never meet in person, and of those that do, only a fraction will form a relationship - but by taking an initial sample in the hundreds of thousands, the research will be assured of a large set of participants who do progress to a full-fledged relationship. Psychologists have long sought longitudinal data of this scale and scope but until now have had no practical way to obtain it. The work is an interdisciplinary combination of methods from the fields of social psychology, human-computer interaction, and quantitative sociology. It will use questionnaire techniques from personality studies, the results of which will be analyzed with statistical methods including structural equation models and event-history analysis. An alternative user interface will be developed on the basis of results of the statistical analyses. This will be followed by a new round of questionnaires and analysis to determine the effects of the intervention. The research will advance scientific knowledge by deepening our understanding of relationship formation processes in general, on a scale large enough to be broadly generalizable and statistically powerful. The results should shed new light on several important questions in social psychology, including the role of personality and attitudinal similarity in long-term relationship satisfaction and success, and the balance between positive and authentic self-presentation for relationship formation. This research will also contribute further to our understanding of the effects of computer-mediated communication on interpersonal relationship formation. An understanding of interpersonal compatibility over computer-mediated communication should help improve collaborative processes in many spheres, including students working together in distance education, and facilitate geographically dispersed team formation for businesses, government, and other organizations.