M.A. / The goal of the present study was to investigate the relationship between personality traits, attitudes towards the Internet, and Internet use. This study was regarded as important because the Internet is increasingly becoming an important part of everyday life, and is changing society as we know it. 224 third year psychology students participated in the study. The existing literature indicated that the personality traits of Extraversion and Openness to Experience were likely to influence Internet use. Attitudes could also be expected to influence volitional behaviour, such as voluntary Internet use. Other research has also found exposure to be positively related to attitudes. A self-constructed questionnaire collected information relating to computer and Internet use, as well as attitudes towards the Internet. A short personality measure, namely the Saucier (1994) 40-ltem Mini-marker set, was used to measure the personality traits of participants. Examination of the results obtained through correlational and multiple regression techniques supported the existing theory. The personality traits of Extraversion and Openness to Experience were found to predict Internet use in certain situations, with Openness emerging as particularly important in understanding computer and Internet use. Attitudes formed by exposure to the Internet, as measured by the self-constructed Internet exposure scale, was found to correlate positively with time spent on the Internet. The study support previous studies which found that the personality traits of Extraversion and Openness influence media use, and suggest that this influence is also present in relation to Internet use. It also supported the theory that a positive relationship exists between attitudes towards the Internet, specifically attitudes formed by exposure, and frequency of Internet use.

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Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University.

M. S.

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This research examines how culture moderates the effect of attitude projection onto the family in terms of opinion certainty. Korean students and American students completed a measure of collectivism-individualism and a measure of family cohesiveness and then indicated their own attitude positions on eight topical issues. Next, each person estimated the positions of either his or her own family, or student peers at their home university, or college students from the respective out-group country. In a fourth condition, participants did not estimate the attitude positions of others. As expected, Koreans and Americans assumed attitude similarity to their family and to their student peers more than to college student out-group members. Also as expected, however, projection onto the family did not lead to an increase in opinion certainty among Korean participants. Only among American participants did attitude projection onto the family correlate with increases in opinion certainty. Despite confirmation of the predicted outcomes for opinion certainty, the additional process measures revealed unexpected findings. These measures showed that individualism predicted the opinion certainty of Koreans following projection onto the family. Only in the out-group projection condition was the opinion certainty of Korean participants correlated with their collectivism scores and their family cohesion scores. These findings are discussed in terms of (1) cultural orientations that influence personality and (2) methodological features of the present study that are typical of social projection research paradigms. / Department of Psychological Science

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