Psychological factors related to self‐disclosure and relationship formation in the online environment

Abstract

The current research constructs a measure of one's willingness to form online relationships and disclose personal and private information and examines how this measure relates to personality and individual differences. In Study 1, we developed a measure to assess one's Openness to Form Online Relationships (OFOR). Two factors emerged: Engagement and Suspicion. Results indicated that individuals who reported higher OFOR Engagement also self‐reported higher self‐concealment and self‐monitoring and lower Honesty‐Humility and Conscientiousness. In Study 2, we examined the extent to which our measures and the OFOR related to people's actual willingness to share personal information. Higher OFOR Engagement was related to greater disclosure. In addition, self‐concealment and the Dark Triad were significantly related to the severity and privacy of self‐disclosure. The current research constructs a new measure of and provides insight into some of the individual differences and personality traits involved in a person's openness to form relationships online and his/her willingness to disclose private information. This work contributes to our understanding of the factors that may make some individuals vulnerable to being deceived by others in the online environment. This work can be used to inform training or messaging to increase community resilience against deception, such as online scams.

Building the Virtual Dancefloor: Delivering and Experiencing House Music Events in the Time of COVID-19

“…Whilst this is simply a reflection of the vast tradition in human society of people meeting to share an experience, it is also somewhat incongruous when considered in the broader context of technological developments since the advent of the internet [17]. The internet has of course revolutionised so many aspects of society, such as music production and consumption [16,27], retail habits [28], personal relationships [29] and concepts of identity [30][31][32]; these radical shifts are now taken as normal in 2024, yet despite the advent of available technologies and online communities, any shift to virtual events remained non-existent until 2020. Indeed, the existing terminology reflects this stasis; whilst virtual events possess a succinct and cogent term, conversely, there may be 'face-to-face' events, 'real-world' events or 'in-person' events, imperfect terms which this research offers could be replaced with the term 'venued events', reflecting the key difference: the presence or lack of a defining and central place.…”

“…As such, we must arguably conceive 'virtual events' not as an event type or form, but as a fundamentally distinct phenomenon with the scale, diversity and depth we perceive in the term 'events', and whilst venued events and virtual events have much in common, they are not entirely similar. Since 2020, the general conception of virtual events has revolved around online technology [111], which fits seamlessly into the milieu of the 'online self' [29,109], increasingly indistinct from our lives offline [32]. Social media, virtual reality and portable and wearable technology have all in some way changed our interactions in the 'real world' to the point where now, accelerated by pandemic restrictions, a virtual event experience is commonplace within our engagement with technology [21,51] such as the significant (and arguably central) role social media plays in society [109].…”