Applications for studying human behavior

[A virtual world] is a place you co-inhabit with hundreds of thousands of other people simultaneously. It’s persistent in that the world exists independent of your presence, and in that your actions can permanently shape the world.

– Ultimate Online

“an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others”

Social psychology has blurred this distinction between actual, imagined, and implied presence

Vignettes vs. confederates and elaborate plots

Vignettes vs. confederates and elaborate plots

Cheaper Less Effort Higher Degree of experimenter

control

Multimedia e.g. Pictures Audio-recordings (Milgram, 1963)

Digital representation of the self in a virtual environment

Social networking site for pre-teens (age 8-14)

Virtual fantasy world for kids represented as penguins

Safe place to socialize, play games and interact

12 million registered users

MMORPG Fantasy game world 9 million users Users spend an

average of 22 hours a week interacting with other avatars

Average age 26 (range 11-68)

A 3D online persistent space totally created and evolved by its users

Users navigate, interact, and view the world through customized avatar

Communicate via typed chat and pre-recorded animations

Macro• Economics (Castranova, 2006)• Epidemiology (Lofgren & Fefferman, 2007)• Legal (Lastowka & Hunter, 2003)

Micro• Nonverbal behavior - transmission of

information and influence by an individual’s physical and behavioral cues

The study of the human use of space within the context of culture

People maintain personal buffer space around themselves and each other (Hall, 1959)

Distances• Intimate• Personal • Social• Public

a nonverbal cue signaling intimacy Eye gaze important in regulating

turn-taking behavior in conversations Gender differences in mutual gaze

• Female-female dyads more likely to exhibit mutual gaze than male-male and mixed dyads

Degree of intimacy within a dyadic interaction maintained by compensatory changes in gaze or personal distance

Balancing personal distance with eye contact

different nonverbal behaviors are sometimes highly correlated with each other

Virtual environment like Second Life allows you to look at a single behavior independent of others

How much are our identities in an virtual environment bound by real life rules/stereotypes and norms?

Yee (2007) looked at social norms of gender, interpersonal distance and eye gaze in Second Life

A script to collect information from avatars in the virtual world• Name• Coordinates (x, y) and yaw• Whether they were talking or not

Each time script was run it would take a “snapshot” of all avatars and their interaction within 200 virtual meters

Gender Interpersonal

Distance

Calculated a gaze sum, adding the gaze angles of both avatars

0 degrees = directly facing

180 degrees = facing away

Took 417 snapshots (8418 unique pairs) Applied Hall’s social distance of 12 feet

• 835 unique pairs Interpersonal Distance

• Mixed dyads stood closer than female-female pairs and both were closer than male dyads

• Gaze sum and distance were negatively correlated, the closer the avatars were, the less they maintained eye contact

Mutual Gaze• Male dyads less likely to look at each other than

mixed and female dyads• Talk sum and gaze sum were negatively correlated

Equlilibrium theory was supported• The closer two people were, the less likely

they were looking at each other Eye gaze regulated conversational

flow• The more they talked the more they looked

at each other

From the results of this study, it suggests people adhere to the same social rules in both the real world and the virtual world

It is possible to study social interaction in a virtual environment and generalize to social interaction in the real world

Only looked at a single virtual environment (Second Life)

Unable to take the context of the interaction into account

Observational study

Yee, N., Bailenson, J. (2007). The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments. Cyberpsychology and Behavior. 10:1, 115-121.

Bailenson, J., Blascovich, J., et al. (2001).Equilibrium Theory Revisited: Mutual Gaze and Personal Space in Virtual Environments. Presence, 10:6, 583–598.

Hall, E. (1959). The silent language. New York: Doubleday. Argyle, M. (1988). Bodily communication, 2nd ed. London:

Methuen. Castronova, E. (2005). Synthetic Worlds : The Business

and Culture of Online Games. University Of Chicago Press. Lofgren, E. T. and Fefferman, N. H. (2007). The untapped

potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 7(9):625-629.