Why Do People Catfish?

hi i'm eric vanman associate professor of psychology at the university of queensland in australia i conduct research in social neuroscience but i also have a lot of research on online behaviors have you ever seen an episode of the mtv series catfish or the 2010 documentary by nev shulman that preceded it maybe you've been a victim of catfishing yourself well you might be surprised to hear that there's been little systematic research about who it is that does catfishing and who their victims are just a few years ago a brilliant undergraduate student of mine samantha lowe monaco began conducting research with me on catfishing from the point of view of psychology first i should define what catfishing is nev shulman's documentary is where the term was first coined it's based on a conversation in the film about a myth that when caught or shipped catfish are placed in their tanks to keep the cod fresh the idea here is that perhaps people sometimes need a catfish-like person in their life to keep them fresh and alive now obviously using a false identity can lead to all sorts of problems for others in our research we don't really look at those cases where people use false identities to lure people into romance or financial scams those people who clearly have an intent from the outset to harm others with their deception and there's actually plenty of good research going on right now about scams that you could find elsewhere the catfishing we have studied is specifically on when people use a fake identity to build a relationship with another person that did not have this intent to defraud the person that is whatever their actual reason people who catfish seek contact with other people with no goal of deliberately hurting that other person let me give you an actual example of catfishing to illustrate what i'm talking about years ago i met someone online on a discussion board and she told me she was a college student and when she learned that i was a professor went on to disclose that she was involved in an affair with one of her professors and i was the first person she had ever told about it i was really concerned for her and over the next few weeks she would tell me through chats about how they had to sneak around his wife's back and that it was affecting her classwork it seemed to get darker and darker but i kept listening to her stories offering my support and concern and advising her that she needed to break it off and go out with a guy who was one of her high school classmates instead this went on for several months she did end the affair and she did start dating that guy from high school but by then i was getting suspicious about the whole story and i started digging around on the internet for some of those details that she would occasionally drop and it turned out that things just didn't add up and i finally discovered who she really was someone about 10 years older than she said she had been and she certainly wasn't the person who was doing all these different things that she said she was doing i confronted her about it and she didn't have much of an explanation for why she created all these stories except that she liked our conversations and she seemed to think her life was otherwise boring so in my personal example you can see that the catfish didn't really have an intent to steal any money or trick me for any other purpose except to have a friendship with me in the research that sam and i did sam was able to find an online group of people who catfished she asked permission from the moderator of the group to recruit participants for our study in which we could then ask them some questions online anonymously of course about their experiences we ended up getting 28 catfish for that first study then in a follow-up study we recruited another 58 participants who had catfished two complete personality questionnaires and compared their responses to a group of people who had never catfished what did we learn about the catfish over half of our participants in our first study reported feeling guilty or remorseful about what they had done some began the deception due to privacy concerns or other matters of convenience and became accidental catfish after forming intimate relationships with these naive other people other catfish were more purposeful in their deception from the outset but again they didn't have the goal to harm or defraud someone else two we were surprised to learn that catfish did not have any sadistic tendencies to speak of that as you might think that a catfish would be gleefully pulling in hapless victims for their personal enjoyment and then cutting them free when the going got tough in study two we gave them a measure of the dark triad these are three dark personality traits called machiavellianism which is the tendency to manipulate other people to reach your goals narcissism and psychopathy as well as a measure of sadistic tendencies called the cast c-a-s-t catfish were a little higher on machiavellianism so yes they did actually feel comfortable manipulating people for their own goals but they showed no differences from our control participants on the measures of narcissism psychopathy or sadism three catfish reported higher levels of depression than non-catfish but they didn't report feeling any lonelier than non-catfish four catfish were no more dishonest or high in their fantasy life than people who were not catfish five many catfish had left their victims with no clear knowledge that they had ever been catfished that is as soon as their victims started asking questions or wanted some sort of proof of their identity or perhaps they suggested that they meet up the catfish would ghost the victim with little warning and thus victims were often left wondering what happened with this person they had felt a strong connection to but who had just disappeared from their lives six many catfish reported that they did catfish because it allowed them to explore aspects of their identity for example their sexuality or their gender that they were uncomfortable sharing in their real life or perhaps their own real life was something that they considered to be dull that they lived in a remote area or they didn't get out much and this fantasy relationship provided an escape now keep in mind that the catfish that i'm talking about are very different from those more infamous cases where someone has catfished a friend or someone else they targeted for some reason that bordered on stalking and in some tragic cases caused the victim to kill themselves those are really horrible sad cases that i think reflect people with agendas or a psychopathology that is very very different from the people that we studied many of our catfish participants in fact only catfished once in their life others did it regularly i think in most cases these catfish would have kept their relationship going for as long as they could indeed some cases that we have come across went on for many months even years [Music] why does catfishing happen who are those victims that get suckered into all of this unfortunately we know very little about the psychology of catfish victims it's something that i would like to conduct more research about and i have plans to begin recruiting victims for a new project in the coming year i've heard from victims directly however when they've emailed me about their stories that once they heard about our research victims are often suffering real loss many have been ghosted and there just was no closure they never found out the real identity of the person they believed was catfishing them some were able to confront their catfish and have remained in contact with them in fact once i confronted my catfish we remained friends for a long time afterwards now that might seem absolutely strange to you i mean this person lied about their identity you want to continue having a friendship with them afterwards i believe that communicating with someone else online is intensely powerful in its intimacy whether you do it with someone you know in real life or not you can chat with each other asynchronously or live and during that time that you're communicating with them there isn't anyone else really coming between you and that person you communicate with it takes on a special privileged type of intimacy sharing secrets thoughts your feelings that helps create bonds between these two people thus the case of catfishing is in many ways no different than any other online relationship that you might have the only real difference is that at least one of the two parties is faking their identity for whatever reason once the relationship falls apart because the identity is revealed or the catfish ghosts the other person there's a real sense of loss of the friendship the romance or whatever it was that these two people were sharing i hope we get my student sam's research published sometime soon so that more people can hear about it i'll try to make another video sometime in the future with updates about our own research until then if you enjoyed this video please give it a like and if you'd like to see more of my videos that i have coming up in future weeks go ahead and subscribe and you won't miss a thing

Channel: SocialNeuro

Views: 6,657

Keywords: catfishing, social media, psychology, ghosting, personality, Catfish, tinder catfishing, catfishing on tinder, social media and mental health, online dating, psychology tricks, online dating is tough, why do people catfish, what is catfishing, social catfish, what is catfishing online, catfish social media, catfish scam, what is a catfish, catfishing people

Id: 4KyRGGRI5_k

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022