What you find is what you believe

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.

An example to follow

A friend read the recent businessweek article on Dan Gillmor and Bayosphere in which I’m quoted (accurately) and said “guess who got the negative quote”. I hope he was kidding, but it forced me to think about the quote, and any future quotes. What’s the difference between a negative quote and a critical quote? There are rare cases where I feel the former is justified, whereas the latter is probably the norm for me. But to the readers eye, perhaps the line is blurred. If you have a tip to help differentiate one from the other, I’m all ears.