Metaperception in Cyberspace

Abstract

Knowing how others perceive us is an important aspect of social life. "Impression meta-accuracy" is the extent to which we are correct in our assumptions about the impressions others have formed of us. The goal of this study was to compare meta-accuracy of WWW homepage creators to meta-accuracy of people in face-to-face interactions. Because creators of WWW pages have a high degree of control over the information they make available online, they may believe that they accurately know the nature of the impressions they give to other people. However, perceivers of homepages must form impressions without many of the social and context cues that influence judgments in a face-to-face setting, including body language and speaking qualities, and thus their impressions may not match those assumed by the creators of the pages. Our results showed a general tendency for homepage creators to believe the impression they gave to those who viewed their pages was more positive than was actually the case, and this discrepancy was greater than in face-to-face interactions. The source of online inaccuracy seems to lie in people's belief that others develop the same impression of them in both online and offline contexts. In fact, perceivers are significantly influenced by whether the information they are receiving is based on face-to-face interaction or on cues obtained from a WWW homepage. Our data demonstrate that one of the challenges of social life in cyberspace is managing one's online persona to take into account the limitations of metaperception.