College Students' Self-Disclosure With Online Strangers: A Hyperpersonal Perspective Test

Different from previous studies focusing on close relationship through the measurement of self-disclosure, this paper endeavors to study how willingly people would disclose verbally to online strangers in China ---generally recognized as a collectivistic culture influenced by Confucian ethics, and it is mainly focused on testing whether collegue students'self-disclosure in stangership is infuenced by the hyperpersonal effect (Walther, 1996). The hyperpersonal perspective is an integrated view of computer-mediated communication which holds that reduced cues, instead of hampering communication, facilitate online relational growth. They may create an opportunity for Internet users to achieve more favorable impressions and to develop greater intimacy than in face-to-face (FtF) situations (Walther, 1996, 1997). The hyperpersonal perspective has been validated in computer-mediated communication in many studies, but whether it is valid in college students'self-disclosure with strangers has not been proved yet. This thesis is an trial effort to make a hyperpersonal test on college students'self-disclosure with online strangers.One expected outcome of the hyperpersonal effect is increased self-disclosure. Based on this perspective, the author hypothethizes that more self-disclosure will be seen in college students'communication with online strangers in a computer-mediated environment than in face-to-face situations. Jourard's Self-Disclosure Questionnaire (1971) was used to assess the level of self-disclosure towards online strangers. Collegue students, most of whom have access to computers and have the experience of communicating with online strangers, are selected as the subjects of this study.The results show that college students'self-disclosure towards online strangers does not exceed self-disclosure with strangers in the real life to a significant level, which shows that the hyperpersonal effect is not salient in college students'self-disclosure with online strangers. The deep-grained prejudices towards strangers arising from traditional Confucian ethics and"Guan xi"should partially be the reason of this result.