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

这是一个大规模的社会关系形成和发展的研究，利用了一个非常大的在线个人网站。几十年来，心理学家一直在研究人际吸引力和社会关系。然而，关系的形成——吸引力和稳定关系之间的中间过程——还没有得到充分的研究。这在很大程度上是由于在这个微妙的阶段招募研究参与者的困难；第二次约会的二人组不会对招募调查做出回应，因为在这一点上，人们自己也不知道他们是否会成为一对。理解是什么导致了成功的形成是理解成功关系的关键一步。这项研究将捕捉关系形成的早期阶段。通过跟踪交流的二人组，在他们见面之前，通过他们面对面的会面，直到建立关系，研究人员将在关系形成的整个关键但模糊的过程中了解他们对彼此的看法。在每一步中，一些二人组会解散——也就是说，有些人永远不会见面，而那些见面的人中，只有一小部分会形成一段关系——但通过采集数十万个初始样本，这项研究将确保一大批参与者会发展成一段成熟的关系。心理学家长期以来一直在寻找这种规模和范围的纵向数据，但直到现在还没有实际的方法来获得它。这项工作是社会心理学、人机交互和定量社会学领域方法的跨学科结合。它将使用人格研究中的问卷调查技术，其结果将用包括结构方程模型和事件历史分析在内的统计方法进行分析。将根据统计分析的结果开发另一种用户界面。随后将进行新一轮的问卷调查和分析，以确定干预措施的效果。这项研究将通过深化我们对一般关系形成过程的理解来推进科学知识，其规模足够大，可以广泛推广，在统计上也很强大。研究结果将为社会心理学中的几个重要问题提供新的线索，包括性格和态度相似性在长期关系满意度和成功中的作用，以及积极和真实的自我表现在关系形成中的平衡。本研究也将有助于我们进一步了解电脑媒介传播对人际关系形成的影响。通过计算机媒介沟通的人际兼容性的理解应该有助于改善许多领域的协作过程，包括在远程教育中一起工作的学生，并促进地理上分散的企业、政府和其他组织的团队形成。

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.