Teaching Personality: Social Media Activity
Yanna Weisberg
This 40-minute in-class activity uses social media profiles to illustrate concepts related to person perception, such as interjudge agreement, convergent validation, behavioral prediction, and impression formation. Though I originally developed this activity for a social psychology recitation section, I now include it when I teach an introductory personality course. Additionally, it would be possible to translate this activity to an online videoconferencing platform that allowed for small group discussion (e.g., Zoom).
For this activity, I pre-select and prepare four social media examples that are openly available and from a demographic my students are not likely to be familiar with, such as being from a different country or part of the country, or a different age cohort. (Full disclosure - I use MySpace profiles from 2006 collected as part of a research study on self-presentation). Each printed profile contains an individual’s profile photo and profile information (e.g., quote, mood, handle, and age). Below each photo is information provided by the profile owner in an “About Me” section, which could include their preferences for books, movies, music, and general favourite things. The four profiles vary in terms of the amount of information available and the style of their photo.
To begin the activity, the class is divided into four groups, with each group given one of the printed profiles to look over and share. Each printed profile starts folded over so that only the profile photo and information are visible. My courses tend to have enrollments between 20 and 30 students; in larger courses either more stimuli or a more easily viewed presentation method might be preferable. The first set of instructions is to just look at the profile information and discuss what you think about this person. If students need more prompting, I ask where they would find this person, and whether they would want to work with them on a group project or become friends with them. If you want to go into more detail or incorporate quantitative measures, you could have students respond to a questionnaire assessing perceptions of traits such as the Big Five. After spending a couple of minutes on just the profile picture, groups are instructed to look at the rest of the “About Me” info and discuss their impressions again, as well as if and how they changed after seeing more of the profile. After a few minutes here (longer for larger groups), groups refold the profiles and pass to the next group in the room to evaluate the profile.
Once all of the groups have seen all of the stimuli, we begin a large group discussion of the four profiles, based around the target questions (e.g., “would you sit next to them?”, “would you befriend them?”, “would you work on a group project with them?”, “where do you think you would find them?"). One member from each group presents their take, and each other group has a chance to agree, disagree, or add to what the presenting group has said. This usually gets fairly lively as students have a lot to say about their perceptions of strangers! Once we have discussed all four, I have a slide with just the key terms, “interjudge agreement”, “convergent validation” and “behavioral prediction". For the first two, I ask for or provide the definition then ask for an example of that from what we have just discussed. This is usually quick as interjudge agreement tends to be quite high (i.e. everyone said they thought Ashley Pixie likes to party) and some examples have great convergent validation (i.e., Ashley Pixie had a photo from a club, mentioned she likes staying out late, and has a preference for dance music).
For behavioral prediction, we can’t observe behavior, but we can match the person to the photos they also uploaded. My next slide includes five photos taken from one of the four social media accounts, and students guess who posted each one. Students are usually very quick to correctly identify the profile owners. The whole activity is a lot of fun and usually quite memorable for students!