Online Honesty

It is interesting to know that people seem to be more honest in an impersonal setting like the online environment

Explains another favorite author of mine, Matt Ridley at the Wall Street Journal (bold emphasis mine)

It is now well known that people are generally accurate and (sometimes embarrassingly) honest about their personalities when profiling themselves on social-networking sites. Patients are willing to be more open about psychiatric symptoms to an automated online doctor than a real one. Pollsters find that people give more honest answers to an online survey than to one conducted by phone.

But online honesty cuts both ways. Bloggers find that readers who comment on their posts are often harshly frank but that these same rude critics become polite if contacted directly. There's a curious pattern here that goes against old concerns over the threat of online dissembling. In fact, the mechanized medium of the Internet causes not concealment but disinhibition, giving us both confessional behavior and ugly brusqueness. When the medium is impersonal, people are prepared to be personal…

Deep in our psyches, the act of writing a furious online critique of someone's views does not feel like a confrontation, whereas telling them the same thing over the phone or face to face does. All the cues are missing that would warn us not to risk a revenge attack by being too frank.

The phenomenon has a name: the online disinhibition effect. John Suler of Rider University, who coined the phrase, points out that, online, the cues to status and hierarchy are also missing. Just like junior apes, junior people are reluctant to say what they really think to somebody with authority for fear of disapproval and punishment. "But online, in what feels like a peer relationship—with the appearances of 'authority' minimized—people are much more willing to speak out or misbehave."

Internet flaming and its benign equivalent, online honesty, are a surprise. Two decades ago, most people thought the anonymity of the online world would cause an epidemic of dishonesty, just as they thought it would lead to geeky social isolation. Then along came social networking, and the Internet not only turned social but became embarrassingly honest. The greatest perils most people perceive in their children's social networking are that they spend too much time being social and that they admit to things that will come back to haunt them when they apply for work

My comments:

Much of our actions seem to be guided by social signaling.

Popular impression about the effects of social networking have hardly been accurate.

I find this article very relevant. I find it easier to discuss or debate online, perhaps for the same reasons cited: cues to status and hierarchy become less of an influence.

But online honesty does have harmful effects too, deficiency in diplomatic expression especially against the powers that may lead to undesirable or even adverse personal consequence such as the arrests or incarceration of bloggers in South Korea or Cuba.

Imprudent social networking remarks (in Facebook or in Twitter) have also costs people jobs and personal relationships.