Method

Using the popular social networking site “LiveJournal,” a Role Playing Game was created in which participants in the study would spend one month interacting using false identities.

LiveJournal is a social networking site in which individuals are able to post “blogs,” a form of online diary or journal, which can be publicly accessed. Visitors can respond to entries with comments, questions, observations, and the like, thus permitting two way communications that is almost purely textual in its nature.

Using this format, a LiveJournal “community,” or collection of users posting to an interconnected series of blogs, was established under the premise of a Role Playing Game, attracting participants from the Role Playing demographic online. This permitted research to be conducted on a collection of participants who were comfortable with the social aspects of the net, and for whom the issue of presenting sex falsely was commonplace and accepted. These participants were asked to involve themselves in playing a game where all participants were presenting false identities, “characters,” who had been tailored to the fantasy presented within the game.

Two different recruiting cycles were engaged in to find players for this game. The first cycle produced individuals who were engaged as confederates. The second recruiting cycle provided additional subjects who would provide the judging of the hypothesis for the study.

The confederate group was recruited initially, providing twelve females and eight males. Two females and one male were eventually lost before the study was properly started, forcing the researcher to participate in the assigned role of the missing male, and the assignment of two of the females to alternate positions within the study. Upon the completion of recruiting, these confederates were divided three ways. The first division was in regard to their actual sex. Males formed one group, and females another. The second division was in regard to the sex they would be presenting in the game. Half were assigned to present their own real sex, the other half were assigned to present as the opposite sex. This resulted in four groups: Females presenting Female, Females presenting Male, Males presenting Female, and Males presenting Male. Finally, each of these four groups was divided in half again, this time with one half being coached on how to present their assigned sex role in accordance with sex-typical behaviors and language, and the other half being coached on how to present their assigned role in the way that the previous studies cited as typical errors amongst false presenters. This resulted in the following breakdown:

In this chart, individuals are identified by the “user name” of the LiveJournal account created for their characters.

These individuals were then given a list of behaviors regarding their assigned roles. These behaviors are summarized here:

How To Present Gender WELL!

Men:

Write more than women

Use sentence fragments

Don't offer much personal information

Only occasionally discuss guy things

Rarely apologize

Engage in aggressive behavior

Swear

Present opinions as fact

Don't use modals

Use FIRM adverbs

Women:

Write less than men

Use good grammar

Apologize frequently

Refer to emotion frequently

Seldom discuss girl things

Minimize own value

Share large amounts of personal information

Share opinions

Use modals

Use adjectives

How To Present Gender POORLY!

Men:

Don't refer to emotion

Don't apologize

Minimize own value

Share opinions

Share large amounts of personal information

Discuss guy things to excess

Womanize

Are Aggressive

Are insulting

Swear excessively

Use modals

Use adjectives

Women:

Don't offer much personal information

Don't get emotional

Are insulting frequently

Don’t present opinion because it’s fact

Talk about girl things to excess

Don't use modals

Use FIRM adverbs

Examples and explanations for each of these were also provided (See Appendix A.) After receiving their assignments and these instructions, the confederates were given the chance to practice these instructions, with coaching as to how to better fill their assigned role.

While this was going on, the game was set up, and the second group of players were recruited. These individuals were recruited knowing that an experiment was being conducted, however they were given no explanation as to what the experiment entailed. They were simply informed that the experiment would last one month, following which they would be asked to participate in a survey.

The purpose for this was to set up a modified form of the Turing Test. In a Turing Test, a judge is asked to interact via computer mediated communications with two individuals. One of them is presenting a false identity, while the other is not. Normally, the Turing Test is used to determine the “intelligence” of computer capabilities by pitting a computer against a live person as each attempts to convince the uninformed judge that it is the human and the competitor is the computer.

In this study, however, rather than pitting a false-presenter with a true-presenter in a one-on-one single session contest as is common with the Turing Test, the judges were placed in a persistent setting (the game) where they were to interact with a number of false-presenters and true-presenters for the period of an entire month. At the end they would act as the judges through the medium of being asked via survey to identify the real sex of both false and true presenters. This task would continue to be hidden from them by placing the question of sex among a series of demographics related questions meant to prevent the judges from determining the purpose of the quiz until after completion and debriefing.

At the end of the thirty day testing period, one confederate from each classification was selected to be the representative on the quiz for that classification. This was done as a result of the discovery that one of the judges had recognized some of the confederates as people they knew because of in game comments referring to shared jokes from outside of the experiment. This resulted in eight confederates being tested with the survey by the judges. One recruited judge later invalidated himself, owing to accidental discovery of the true purpose of the experiment.