ИСТИНА

Participants of social networks experience a temptation to build multiple profiles/identities which are homomorphous (sometimes isomorphic, often contradictive) to their real-life identities. While this experience may be viewed as a masquerade, it’s hard to deny psychological grounds of possessing multiple online identities. Every time a social networker owns over one profile, we will refer to them as alternative identities, irrespective of which is ‘real’. 42 social networkers (15 to 25 years old), half of them females, participated in the study. Each was presented an Identity Dilemma, which involves issues of online identity and moral development. The dilemma was worked out by the team of the Good Play Project, headed by Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education). It was translated into Russian and used by permission from the developers. Semi-structured interviewing procedure included putting selected questions to the participants while discussing the dilemma issues. The interview narratives were classified and the following attitudes were selected, referring to alternative identities: affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Factor analysis, dispersion analysis and content analysis were performed to handle the data. Differences in attitudes, dependent on age/gender groups and psychological parameters are described.