Who are "Stinkybug" and "Packerfan4"?
Email Pseudonyms and Participants' Perceptions (Auffassung, Vorstellung) of Demography, Productivity, and Personality
Jennifer M. Heisler
Department of Rhetoric, Communication, and Journalism
Scott L. Crabill
Bachelor of General Studies Program
A review written by Armin Unterhauser
The article is about a study which tries to evaluate peoples perceptions of other individuals by reading their email username. Before beginning I have to make an explanation of a few abbreviations:
URT: Uncertainty Reduction Theorie, the scope of the theory is narrowed down to rest on the premise that strangers, upon meeting, go through certain steps and checkpoints in order to reduce uncertainty about each other and form an idea of whether one likes or dislikes the other.
CMC: computer-mediated-communication
Because of our modern technology nowadays nearly everybody can use the internet in almost every place. Millions of different users are spread around the world.
Normally on the first face-to-face meeting of two strangers, anyone of them tries to find out things about the other to decide about his popularity. The URT researches the strategies individuals use to check others on first gathering. This study explores if, in CMCs, people use email usernames as a basic for constructing perceptions of other individuals and how they do this.
The URT says that people in face-to-face communications have the desire to know as much as possible about their conversational partner because in the first conversation with an individual they have to decide whether to like him or not. In absence of the possibility to classify the dialog partner, people get uncertainty. In CMC many information is missing, e.g. voice-sound, gesture, …, so that the uncertainty is predicted. That is why arises the assumption that individuals try to compensate the lack of information in CMC through the exploration of email usernames. That’s why the authors made 6 hypothesizes:
- “Study participants will utilize email usernames as sources of information about the “sender” of the message.
- Study participants will provide more descriptive information for creative email usernames than for plain usernames
- Study participants will provide greater amounts of information for those email usernames identified as chosen by the sender than for usernames considered to have been assigned to the sender
- Study participants will view creative email usernames as having been chosen by senders more often than plain usernames. Conversely, plain usernames will be identified as having been assigned to the senders more often than creative usernames.
- a) Owners of creative usernames will be perceived by study participants as more productive and desirable to work with in group settings than owners of plain usernames.
- b) Owners of creative usernames will be perceived as having more positive personality traits than owners of plain usernames.
- Study participants will be more likely to open a message from a person with a creative username than a message from a person with a plain username.”
The authors also want to know: “What reasons to participants give for opening as opposed to deleting an incoming message?”
To see, if their hypothesizes are true, they use self-report surveys. 300 students were chosen to fill out the two-section-survey. They said to the participants that they were assigned to a group consisting of three people and they had to do a class project together. Them were told, that they only know the email username of the other two group members. Six fictional usernames were created and every participant get two by a randomize system. The usernames were “ZH7624”, “ai4773”, “Sober4alilbit”, “Stinkybug”, “packerfan4” and “wanna69”.
In the first section of the survey they had to identify sex, race and age of the hypothetical users and they always could also answer with “don’t know”. They also were asked if the would open a email send by one of this addresses and if they think the username is chosen or assigned. In addition they had to fill out some question where the answers were scaled in 5-point responses (1=strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree). In the second section of the survey they had to write free their impressions and a description of the assumed person behind the username.
The results show if the hypotheses made before are either true or false:
- More than a half of the participants gave information about sex, ethnicity and age in the first section of the survey. In the second section 270 participants provided 1019 categorizable pieces of information.
- Participants provided the plain usernames (ZH7624, ai4773) with less information than the creative (“wanna69”, “sober4alilbit”, “packerfan4”, “stinkybug”) ones.
- The results indicated that email usernames perceived as selected by the owner were more likely to be assigned to a particular ethnicity, a biological sex and an age than those emails perceived as assigned.
- The evaluation shows clearly that participants will view creative email usernames as having been chosen by senders more often than plain usernames.
- a) This hypothesis is false, because the ranking for the most likely username to work with is “stinkybug”, “ZH7624”, ai4773”,…, “sober4alilbit”.
- b) This hypothesis is also false, because the ranking of perceptions of work productivity is “stinkybug”, … , “sober4alilbit”.
- There is no difference in accepting/deleting emails from creative or plain usernames. 206 of the 300 participants delete emails from unknown senders because they fear “virus” and “spam”.
The whole study shows that usernames in emails provide an opportunity to gather information about senders. One problem of this study is the increasing number of spam-mails, which complicate this area of research. Also many participants annotate that the subject line of an email is very important for considering the nature of contact.
In my opinion this study shows only evident facts and the authors don’t show exactly the results of their evaluation. For example they don’t show how many participants presumed that “wanna69” is male or female. I think that most of participants perception is that the sex of “wanna69” is male, because they believe that only men use sexual oriented usernames. And I also think they had to differ between experienced and “greenhorn” internet users, because with the daily growing spam-mountain and virus affections no expert user will open an email send by an unknown username. Normally I never make conclusions by only reading the username, the most important thing for the decision to either open or delete an email is the subject line as many participants also wrote.
