My goal is to help my audience reflect on the gap between their online and offline social behaviors and guide them toward reducing this gap through a series of reflective and rehearsal steps. There are three key stages with this tool I’m envisioning: reflection through social archetypes, mental rehearsal of real life scenarios, and social sharing for peer feedback. This method helps users acknowledge their strengths in online environments and practice applying these skills in real-world interactions.
AI Chatbot and the Big Five Personality Framework
The tool begins with a personalized interview conducted through a customized AI chatbot (ChatGPT as foundation) based on the Big Five personality framework, with a particular focus on the extraversion scale. Extraversion is key because it determines how users engage socially, whether they are more outgoing or reserved in different environments.
-Interview Process: The AI asks users questions about their social behaviors in online gaming contexts and offline settings. The interview gathers insights into how users communicate, lead, collaborate, and handle conflict in each environment.
The AI then analyzes the responses to pinpoint the user’s social archetype in both contexts, how they behave in online gaming and how they interact in offline situations.
2. Reflection Through Social Archetype Visualizations
Once the user’s online and offline social archetypes are identified, the next step is reflection. This is an important part of the process, where users are given the opportunity to see the gap between how they behave in online and offline settings.
Visualization:
The archetypes are visualized using generative AI built into the chatbot, providing a graphic representation of their online and offline personas. The online archetype might depict the user as a leader or team collaborator, whereas the offline archetype might show a more reserved or passive role in offline interactions.
Purpose of Reflection:
This stage is inspired by Jung’s Identity Gap Theory, which explores the discrepancy between personal and enacted identities. More often than not, the online persona (in this case, often more confident or outgoing) reflects an individual’s ideal self, while the offline persona (in this case, often more reserved) may reflect their actual self.
By reflecting on these two archetypes side by side, users can start to acknowledge the gap between their idealized self in the online world and their real-life behavior. This reflection serves as the first step in identity negotiation, helping users recognize that the strengths they display online.
3. Mental Rehearsal for Offline Social Skills
After the visualization and reflection process, the next stage will focus on mental rehearsal, where users are guided through real life social scenarios. This is designed to help them practice applying their online social strengths to real world interactions.
Scenario Design:
The AI presents the user with parallel scenarios:
-Online Scenario: “You’re leading a group in an online multiplayer game, organizing the team to achieve a shared objective. How do you communicate with your teammates? How do you lead and resolve conflicts?”
-Offline Scenario: “Now imagine you’re in a face-to-face group setting at work. You need to take charge and coordinate the group to complete a task. How do you apply the same leadership skills here?”
Role of Mental Rehearsal:
This step is inspired by McGlade’s (2021) research, which demonstrates the effectiveness of mental rehearsal in reducing anxiety and improving behavioral outcomes. McGlade found that individuals who mentally rehearsed scenarios related to their fears showed significantly greater improvement compared to control groups, particularly in confidence and approach behaviors (McGlade, 2021, p.42).
4. Social Sharing for Peer Feedback and Reinforcement
The final step is social sharing, where users are encouraged to share their archetype results with their social circle. By sharing the visualized archetypes through social media, users can receive feedback and encouragement from friends and peer, and also hopefully generate some buzz and discussion around their archetypes and this tool I’m trying to create.
Social sharing can also serve as a motivator, as users might feel more accountable for applying their online strengths in real life after receiving encouragement from their friends. But I also understand that this places some responsibility on the user’s social circle and results could vary widely depending on the circle. I hope this peer support can help reinforce the work they have done in reflecting and mentally rehearsing offline scenarios and help them feel more confident in their real-world interactions.
Conclusion
My intervention method combines reflection, mental rehearsal, and optional social sharing to provide a comprehensive approach to bridging the identity gap.
Currently, I am in the process of brining this tool to life through a Custom GPT model as foundation. As this project evolves, things may change during development, and the impact of this intervention is still to be determined. However, I am quite excited about what I am currently doing!
References
McGlade, A.L. (2021). Optimizing Exposure: Between-Session Mental Rehearsal as an Augmentation Strategy. University of California, Los Angeles.