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As a virtual world teaming with avatars, Second Life shows promise as an experimental platform for social psychology. The first research paper that exploited this got attention at the end of last year – the authors claimed to have found evidence that some details of how we interact in the real world transfer to our avatar-avatar interactions. Now, there’s a great video out from NPR that brings these findings to life. |
The video has been making blog rounds, but the study behind it is being taken as mantra. Yee and colleagues’ work is indeed groundbreaking – but exploratory, not conclusive.
Yee & colleagues suggest that we behave in the virtual world just as we do in the real world. Specifically, that whether we look directly at someone else or not (eye gaze) and how closely we stand to someone else (interpersonal distance) depends on our gender. In Second Life, Yee et al show us, for example, that male avatars stand further away from other male avatars than they do from female avatars. They conclude:
Overall, our findings support our overall hypothesis that our social interactions in online virtual environments, such as Second Life, are governed by the same social norms as social interactions in the physical world … <clip> …then this means it is possible to study social interaction in virtual environments and generalize them to social interaction in the real world.
Annalee Newitz in a full critique points out:
- Yee et al are observing ‘avatar’ behaviors, and the interpretation is much more complex when you realize that the people behind the avatar may be gender-switched. A woman who’s a male in SL who stands further away from a male avatar than a female avatar is not following her real-life social norm. You can’t talk about virtual world dynamics allowing us to study real-life dynamics without taking this complexity into consideration – Yee et al don’t bring it up in their paper.
- At best Yee et al’s study looks at the subpopulation of avatars that are humanoid (as opposed to objects or furries, etc) and at worst is meaningless because the authors often guessed the gender of avatars that weren’t obviously male or female, in this way crafting the results of the study to match their own social expectations. Take my long-ago friend Max Case’s avatar, how would you define it? For the researchers categorizing the gender of avatars by eye, a pair of avatars who were closer might have looked more female whereas the same pair might have ‘looked’ male if they were further apart. You find what you already subconsciously believe.
There’s a little bit more that’s troubling. Yee and colleagues also note that there is no clear consensus in the literature on the relationship between real life gender and interpersonal distance. In other words, their title should more accurately read -”The Persistence of theorized nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments”. Finally, the authors measure two aspects of ‘nonverbal social norms’, one is interpersonal distance between avatars, but the other is eye gaze. I don’t think I would know how to interpret eye gaze data in Second Life. As Brainy in Second Life I almost never manipulate my eye gaze, and from what I can tell it’s an artifact of where I randomly leave my mouse. My avatars eyes are certainly not moving in alignment with my attention as occurs in real life.
I would not disagree with Yee et al if they had made a general conclusion based on anecdotal evidence that some aspects of our real-life behavior transfer to virtual worlds. There are some aspects of my pixelated life that do mirror real-life. As the NPR video shows, I’ve observed my avatar Brainy – and other avatars – recoil on being ‘bumped’ in-world. But then ‘being bumped’ was one of the reportable offenses I recall I learned about way back in the day when I joined Second Life. So – am I reacting to a virtual world ‘law’ or to a sense of violation of my personal space?
To give the authors credit, they are pioneers in doing this work. I wish they hadn’t overextended their conclusions. More detail and introspection on the complexities of transfering real-life assumptions to virtual worlds would also have helped.
On a slight tangent, Annalee Newitz describes herself as a ’surly media nerd who doesn’t appreciate anthropologists coming around and trying to make her world just like theirs’. My inner cussed individualism is pleased.
(Nick Yee, the first author of the paper, is the creator of a fantastic site, “The Daedalus Project” that collects data on virtual worlds and MMORPGs).
(Max Case’s photograph above is CC-licensed, attrib, non-commercial, no-derivs from Wagner James Au. And thanks Max for your voting machine and talking stick that introduced me to SL’s wonderful world of barter. Hope you’re enjoying the water cooler! Max can be found with the Wishfarmers)
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