Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Communication

The hyperpersonal model (Walther, 1995) proposes that idealization can occur when individuals meet and interact in text-based, cue-lean online environments. This study sought to understand the mechanisms that might predict one's idealization of another, including their anxieties and uncertainty about the other. Further, this work incorporates the imagined interactions framework (Honeycutt, 2015), in an effort to explore the cognitive mechanisms that may lead to idealization. Participants (N = 79) took an online survey at time 1, then came to a lab to chat with an unknown partner, a confederate, at time 2. They completed a survey after the first chat, reporting their idealization of their partner, liking of the partner, and perceived similarity to the partner. After the first survey at time 2, anticipated future interaction was manipulated. Participants were either told they would meet their partner face-to-face in the next lab session or were not told anything about them. Following the manipulation, participants took another survey, measuring their anticipated future interaction and desired future interaction, as well as their uncertainty and desired uncertainty about the partner. Participants returned to the lab two days later to take another survey and engage in another chat. At this time, participants shared whether or not they had an imagined interaction with their partner after the first chat. The survey items measured the frequency and specificity of their imagined interactions, as well as the rehearsal of conversations using imagined interactions. Social anxiety did not predict one's uncertainty about their partner nor their use of imagined interaction features. One imagined interaction feature, specificity, did predict one's idealization of their partner. Idealization and desired future interaction had a relationship over time as well, with idealization after the first chat predicting a desire for future interactions, and desire for future interactions pred (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jesse Fox (Advisor); Roselyn Lee-Won (Committee Member); Joseph Bayer (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Philosophy

The dissertation examines two putative explanations from statistical mechanics with the aim of understanding the nature and role of idealizations in those accounts, namely, the Yang-Lee account of phase transitions and the Boltzmannian account of irreversible behavior. Like most explanations in physics, these accounts involve idealizations to some extent. Many idealized explanations hold out the hope that the idealizations can be removed or eliminated with further work. However, the idealizations that occur in the accounts of phase transitions and irreversibility are ineliminable. The only way (in principle) to obtain a description – let alone an explanation – of these phenomena is to invoke various idealizing assumptions. Ineliminably idealized explanations are not well-understood from a philosophical point of view. Indeed, most philosophers of science would probably hold that no idealizations are ineliminable. The dissertation argues that this view is mistaken, showing where and why extant accounts of idealization miss this fact by distinguishing the widely-accepted understanding of idealizations as falsehoods from a novel understanding of idealizations as abstractions. As abstractions, idealizations are devices for ignoring certain details about the real world. The dissertation argues that ineliminable idealizations cannot be falsehoods, and that they should be understood as abstractions. The dissertation also examines the confirmation of idealized hypotheses and their role as guides to what the world is like. At least some idealized hypotheses have some degree of confirmation; and less idealized hypotheses tend to be better confirmed than their more idealized counterparts. If idealizations are falsehoods, Bayesian confirmation theory seems unable to obtain these results, because it lacks a way of defining the prior probabilities of idealized hypotheses. If idealizations are abstractions, however, idealized hypotheses about a system are incomplete claims that omi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Neil Tennant (Advisor) Subjects: Philosophy; Physics, General