Virtual relationships

• Virtual relationships in social media: it's now more common to develop relationships by communicating through social media. Psychologists are interested why online relationships seem to disclose more and develop intimacy sooner than in real life
• One explanation of virtual relationships disclosing more than in real life relationships is the absence of gating mechanisms:

  • Communicating through the internet removes a number of factors that normally act as filters or barriers stopping interactions in face to face encounters
  • Barriers such as a level of physical attractiveness, speech defects, age group or being from a different social or ethnic backgrounds
• Another explanation of virtual relationships disclosing more than in real life relationship is the reduced cue theory:

  • Computers lack some of the features of face to face communication such as non verbal communication, e.g. facial expressions, to give an indication about what someone means by what they say
  • This may result in people reading too much into typed communication or just reading what they want to read into the communication
• Another explanation of virtual relationships disclosing more than in real life is the factor of anonymity:

  • Deindividuation results in a reduction of feelings of responsibility leading to a loss of inhibition, individuals can say things online that they never would in real life
  • This lack of the normal distancing behaviours that face to face interactions are normally regulated lead to feelings of closeness and intimacy but also behaviours like sexting and trolling 
• A reason why virtual relationships can develop more quickly than real life relationships is the hyperpersonal model:

  • Identified by Walther 
  • People can manipulate their online identity significantly and control interactions to display a hyper honest, or hyper dishonest version of themselves 
  • The hyper honest person is self disclosing but the hyper dishonest person is creating another version of themselves which the other person might find attractive which is harder to do in face to face. This is where the concept of catfishing comes from 
• Smith and Duggan's 1:

  Smith and Duggan's research provides evidence for online dating in virtual relationships on social media. In a large scale national survey of over 2000 American participants, found the use of online dating is becoming more acceptable. With 53% of people agreeing that “online dating allows people to find a better match for themselves because they can get to know a lot more people”. With the biggest reasons for using online dating being meeting people who share similar hobbies (60%), and beliefs and values (52%).
• Smith and Duggan's 2:

  However, 54% of internet daters felt like someone else seriously misrepresented themselves in their profile. This suggests that people see the internet as a way to overcome filters/gates by meeting more people. But they are able to get to know them well through self disclosure of personal interests. But also others are able to take advantage of the hypersona model by producing a dishonest version of themselves. 
• Rosenfeld and Thomas showed the importance of online communication for developing romantic relationships. They investigated whether there was a link between having internet access at home and being involved in a romantic relationship. Out of 4,000 participants studied, 71.8% of those with internet access were married or had a romantic partner, compared to only 35.9% of those without internet access. These findings suggests that a virtual environment helps people to establish and maintain romantic relationships
• An issue with studying virtual relationships in social media is that it is affected by changes in a fast paced society. Most of the research examining virtual relationships was conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As technology is changing rapidly, so is the nature of online relationships. Therefore, psychological research in this area risks becoming outdated by the time it is published. This lowers the temporal validity of research into online relationships, meaning that the findings may not necessarily apply to the currency situation  
• Mckenna et al 1:

  There are also important gender differences in virtual relationships. Mckenna et al found that women tended to rate their relationships formed online as more inmate and valued self disclosure, especially in terms of emotion, in comparison to men. Men on the other hand, preferred activities based disclosure (such as common interests in motorsports) and rated their online relationships as less close than face to face ones.
• Mckenna et al 2:

  This suggests that research into online relationships may show alpha bias, as it assumes that males and females experiences on virtual relationships are different. However, it could be that male and female experiences of virtual relationships are similar and there are methodological issues with the research into this area that exaggerate the differences (e.g. the choice of interview/questionnaire as a research tool).