Do you understand the psychology of online relationships? Flysister review

There’s no question that more and more of us are spending huge portions of our time online and being the social creatures that we are, we naturally develop online relationships in much the same way as we would offline. We may have gone out purposely to find the love of our lives on an online dating or chat website, or maybe we have developed a social network of friends quite by chance through our online interactions. Whatever we are doing online and our reasons for doing it, it is inevitable that we will encounter difficulties, as well as positives in our online relationships.

For anyone that has spent time online it becomes apparent that our online relationships can be sublime and they can also be very tricky. But why? What kinds of differences can we see between relationships that are based purely in the online world in comparison to our relationships based mainly in the offline world? What types of online psychological behavior do we exhibit and what does that tell us about our online relationships?

The psychology of internet relationships

Many of the dynamics we see in our online relationships can be explained very well by traditional psychological theory. So explained in laymans terms, let’s take a look at some of these aspects to help us understand our online relationships better and survive them intact.

As well as some answers, you’ll also see a lot of questions being posed here since there is still a great deal that is unanswered in terms of how the internet challenges our understanding of human interaction and how it affects our online relationships.

The role of perception in online relationships

Here’s one definition of perception to think about, especially in relation to online relationships, online dating and perception:

So perception is about sorting and processing the information that we receive through our 5 senses:

• touch,
• sight,
• hearing,
• taste,
• smell,

(We can also insert a 6th sense if we want to – intuition.)

Can you see an immediate problem that we may encounter with our online relationships as opposed to our offline ones? Unlike the offline world where we use all 5 senses to gain information, when online we can only primarily use one sense to gain information with – sight. We are also very limited in our use of our sense of sight, because we can’t benefit from the normal cues we pick up through non-verbal communication. We can see words that are typed, we can see someones avatar if they choose to post one and we can watch video or see someone through a webcam.

If using a webcam or video we can also use our sense of hearing, but the majority of online communication is through words on a screen. We can’t pick up each others pheromones, we can’t communicate via our eyes, we can’t communicate via gestures, intonation or tone of voice, we don’t know how it feels to hug that person or give them a squeeze of the hand.

What’s missing online? sensory information and body language

So clearly most of our perceptual equipment cannot be utilized in our online relationships. Consequently, we miss out on huge chunks of information about other people that we would normally have. Various studies have been carried out to explore how much of our communication is verbal as opposed to non verbal. The percentage splits have been different, but what is not disputed is that non verbal communication is a very important aspect of communication and the development of human relationships.

The major disadvantage of online relationships and communication is that there is no body language to read. One study shows that 93% of communication is through non verbal means (including body language) and only 7% down to verbal communication. So online, we’re stuck with having to try to do all of our communicating (both listening and speaking) with 7% of the tools we would normally use. This is a bit like trying to fix a car with only a hammer and one socket wrench! How effective can our online relationships really be with such a limited amount of tools at our disposal?