Method
Participants
Sixty-two undergraduate students (28 males, 32 females, 2 did not report their
gender; ages 18–22) participated in this study in exchange for extra credit in their
communication classes.
Procedure and stimuli
Participants were told they would be reading real online daters’ profile selfdescriptions.
They were seated in small groups in a projection room (but did not
interact with each other) and were instructed to carefully read each self-description
and then answer two questions about it.
The same 78 self-descriptions used in Study 1 were included here. As reading all
the self-descriptions would be a lengthy and tiresome process, participants were only
asked to read a subset of 22 self-descriptions. Each subset was rated by at least 15
participants. To avoid order effects, the viewing order of the self-descriptions within
each subset was randomized.