The Proteus Paradox
Page 15
Many aspects of everyday human psychology are well studied and known. Unfortunately, some of the findings are truly depressing. One example is the unfair advantage that attractiveness bestows. The well-known maxims “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and “Beauty is skin deep,” though comforting, are both empirically false. In a meta-analysis of eighteen hundred studies on attractiveness, Judith Langlois and her colleagues found that both within and across cultures, people agree on who is and is not attractive. In addition, attractive people are perceived to be more capable in their jobs, more competent in social situations, better adjusted, and more fun to talk to. They are also paid more attention, given better rewards, and in general treated more favorably in social interactions. As has been long documented, these lifelong positive biases have tangible benefits. Attractive people do better in their careers, have dated more people, have had sex with more people, are more confident, more extraverted, and in better physical and mental health than people who are less attractive. As one concrete example out of many similar papers, one study found that attractive criminal defendants received lighter sentences than less attractive defendants.11
If giving football and hockey players black uniforms makes them more aggressive, Bailenson and I wondered whether giving people attractive avatars would make them more extraverted. Could a lifelong disposition be altered by something as intangible and transient as a series of pixels on a screen? At the Stanford lab, we had a secret weapon that improved our odds. Instead of a typical desktop virtual world, we had an immersive virtual reality lab. Users donned a head-mounted display with a small, high-resolution screen for each eye (thus allowing stereoscopic vision). The headgear had a small infrared light that was tracked continuously by four cameras, one at each corner of the room. An embedded accelerometer, like the ones found in iPhones and Nintendo Wii remotes, tracked the user’s rotation. Thus, when the user moved forward, the cameras would track the infrared light and update the virtual world accordingly. When the user turned, the accelerometer would track the rotation, and the user’s perspective in the virtual world would change. The system had a refresh rate of 60 Hz, permitting a seamless, immersive experience with no detectable lag. More important, no keyboarding or mousing was needed to navigate this virtual environment. To walk forward in the virtual world, you simply walked forward in the physical world. To look up in the virtual world, you looked up in the physical world. Thus, someone could come to our lab, put on the goggles, and immediately find himself or herself walking around in a European city, a high school classroom, or a rainforest jungle.
It’s hard to explain how fast people forget about their physical surroundings when they put the goggles on. One popular demo we had was a virtual ten-foot-deep pit in the middle of a virtual room with a wooden plank running across the top. Some people chose not to cross the plank when given the option. Those who did walk the plank were often visibly nervous and jittery. Whenever we ran this demo, we had to assign a research assistant to catch the person should he or she start to fall—people’s bodies reacted to the virtual falling automatically, and they would begin to crouch and lose their balance. I was soon relieved of this duty when Bailenson noticed that I was horrible at catching people before they fell down.
For our study, we created a virtual world that was an exact replica of the physical lab room. This may seem strange, but it solved a practical problem. Without clearly marked boundaries in the virtual world, people would crash into the physical walls of the lab and hurt themselves. The easiest, albeit uncreative, way to prevent this was to replicate the walls in the virtual environment. In the study itself, we randomly assigned students to either an attractive or an unattractive avatar. Because the immersive virtual environment provided a first-person perspective, we created a virtual mirror for participants to see their virtual selves. On the other side of the virtual room was a stranger, controlled by a research assistant. This virtual stranger would greet the participant and ask the participant to come closer. The stranger would then ask the participant to introduce him- or herself using the prompt, “Tell me a little about yourself.” We found that people given attractive avatars walked almost three feet closer to the stranger than people given unattractive avatars. They also shared more pieces of personal information with the stranger. These findings were consistent with the self-perception effect. People conformed to the expectations of their avatar’s appearance. The brief exposure to an attractive avatar made participants more gregarious with a virtual stranger.12
We implemented several safeguards to rule out alternative explanations. For example, we know that people treat attractive people more positively. This means that the effect of the attractive avatar could actually be driven by the confederate’s reactions, not the self-perception effect. To prevent this, we programmed the virtual world such that the confederate always saw the participant’s avatar with the same stock face. In other words, only the study participant saw his or her “real” face. Another potential explanation is that the attractiveness or unattractiveness of the faces was so blatant that participants were consciously role-playing social stereotypes or unconsciously yielding to the expectations of the researchers. To test for this, we asked participants to guess the goals of the study. Almost all thought that we were comparing an immersive virtual interaction with a face-to-face or desktop virtual world interaction. No participant mentioned attractiveness or thought that attractiveness was being manipulated in the study.
Even though Bailenson and I had found that a subtle manipulation in avatar attractiveness led to noticeable differences in how people behave in virtual worlds, we wondered whether this was an idiosyncratic outcome, perhaps unique to attractiveness or the specific virtual interaction. So we picked another variable to test. Like the unfair advantage of attractiveness, height is a well-studied and depressing psychological variable. We perceive taller people to be more competent, more confident, and better suited to be leaders. In fact, height translates into tangible differences in income. In 2004, business school professors Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable gathered data from more than eight thousand people from four sources of labor statistics and found that each inch of increase in height leads to a projected increase in annual earnings of roughly $800. A person who is six feet tall earns $5,525 more each year than someone who is five feet, five inches, even after controlling for gender, weight, and age.13
At the lab, we wondered if giving someone a taller avatar would make them more confident. We again put participants into a virtual environment modeled on the physical lab and had them interact with a stranger. But instead of using an introductory prompt, we had participants in the study play a bargaining game with the confederate. We asked the participant and the confederate to share a hypothetical pool of $100. One would offer a split, and the other would either accept or reject the split. If the both parties accepted the split, they would share the money accordingly. If one rejected the split, neither would receive any money. There were four rounds of this game. The participant would make the split in the first round, and we scripted the confederate to accept this split every time. In the second round, the confederate would make an even 50–50 split. In the third round, the participant would make the split again. But in the final round, the confederate would make an unfair split of 75–25 in his or her own favor. This negotiation exercise would reveal two things: How aggressively does the participant bargain? And what does he or she do when an unfair offer is made?
The participants in the study were given avatars that were either the same height, ten centimeters (four inches) taller, or ten centimeters shorter than the confederate’s avatar. All participants offered near-even splits in the first round, so there was no difference between the height conditions. But during the third round, people given taller avatars made an offer (in their own favor) that was on average almost $10 more than people given shorter avatars. And when the confederate made the unfair offer in the final round, people given taller avatars were half as likely to accept it as
people given shorter avatars. As with the attractiveness study, we programmed the virtual world such that the confederate was blind to the participant’s virtual height (with the help of a little trigonometry). And when asked to guess the goals of the study, again no participant mentioned that avatar height had been manipulated.14
Together, these two studies show that subtle manipulations in avatar appearance have dramatic effects on how people interact with each other in virtual worlds. And these effects occur rapidly, fewer than sixty seconds after being in a new digital body. We think of avatars as things of our own creation, digital clay that can be endlessly shaped. But avatar creation is actually a two-way process. The fact is that our avatars change us in turn. As discussed in the Introduction, Bailenson and I labeled this phenomenon the Proteus Effect after the Greek sea god who was capable of assuming many forms.
These two studies also led us to think about online gamers who spend on average twenty hours each week in virtual worlds. The lab studies showed how avatars change behavior within the virtual world, but what happens when people step back into the physical world? Does the Proteus Effect immediately disappear once the user logs out, or does it transfer to subsequent interactions outside the virtual world? We decided to rerun the attractiveness study with a twist. After coming out of the immersive virtual environment, the students participated in a separate study on online dating among college students. This study took place in front of a standard desktop computer, and the students created profiles on a mock online dating website geared toward college students. After creating their profile and answering some basic personality questions, they saw a grid of nine photographs of college students (from a different university) and selected the two people from the grid they were most interested in meeting. We found that study participants who embodied an attractive avatar in the virtual environment subsequently selected more attractive people from the grid to meet. Even when the students were no longer in a virtual world and interacting using a different technology altogether, their avatar’s appearance still mattered.15
Digital Doppelgängers
In 2008, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that two-thirds of baby boomers born between 1945 and 1955 have not saved enough money to maintain their lifestyle in retirement. The 2012 Retirement Confidence Survey revealed that more than half of current workers have not tried to calculate how much money they will need to save for retirement. It is not easy to defer immediate gratification for an incredibly intangible future thirty or forty years down the road. The desires and payoffs of the present moment are always concrete and known—a bigger TV, Starbucks lattes every morning, a fancier car. The desires of your future, retired self are a vague abstraction at best, especially for young college grads starting their first job. This is what makes it so difficult to save money for retirement. It requires the discipline to defer an immediate, known, concrete reward for an undefined and unknown benefit decades in the future.16
Hal Hershfield, a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, used avatars to bring the future forward. Instead of putting participants in a different person’s body, Hershfield put undergraduate students in avatars modeled from photographs of their faces. In half of these self avatars, Hershfield left the faces unaltered. In the other half, he digitally aged the faces to realistically add white hair, wrinkles, and sagging skin. As in the attractiveness study, the students saw themselves in a virtual mirror. The students then had to imagine that they had just received a windfall of $1,000. Their task was to allocate that sum among four options: buying a gift for someone special, investing in a retirement fund, planning an extravagant occasion, and putting the money into a checking account. The students who were given avatars of their seventy-year-old selves put twice the amount of money into their retirement accounts compared with students in avatars of their current selves. By bringing the future forward, Hershfield took an intangible, older self and made it visible and salient to college students.17
Instead of using virtual worlds to put people in fantasy bodies, Hershfield’s study highlighted the power of using virtual worlds to hijack someone’s body and face. This painless virtual plastic surgery allows us to change how we think about ourselves and our future. Jesse Fox, a professor of communication at the Ohio State University, took this idea in a different direction. Virtual worlds allow us to change not only how an avatar looks but also how an avatar behaves. In a virtual world, we can replicate your body and then digitally animate it to do anything we want, including things we’ve never done in the physical world. But why would we want to make digital doppelgängers?
One important way humans learn is by watching other people. Not only do we learn new behaviors by watching others, but we also learn the expected outcomes of a behavior. After all, it would significantly diminish our species’ survival if we each individually had to poke our fingers into an electric socket to learn that it is a bad idea. Thus, when we see Peter get praised for playing the piano well, we learn that playing the piano is one way of being rewarded. This in turn makes it more likely we’ll go learn to play the piano. But watching someone else is not sufficient. It’s important that we are able to identify with this other person. The more similar the person is to us, the more certain it is that our outcomes will match. Thus, if Peter turns out to be a young piano prodigy who has been composing symphonies since he was twelve, most of us probably wouldn’t be rushing to learn the piano. But if Peter is roughly our own age, with a similar social background, and is playing quite well after learning the piano for only one month, we may be intrigued enough to take piano lessons. Of course, it is difficult to create the perfect model for a specific person. At best, we may provide an inspiring figure that is of the same gender and roughly the same age.
In contrast, in a virtual world, we can create the perfect model of any person by creating an avatar of him or her. In Fox’s study, she brought students into the immersive virtual environment and they watched their digital doppelgängers either run on a treadmill or stand idly in the virtual lab room. In other words, Fox created a digital version of the students that they had no control over. She found that students who had watched their doppelgängers run on the treadmill were more likely to exercise over the next twenty-four hours. Your digital doppelgänger in a virtual world can change how you behave in the real world.18
Hijacking the Brain
In the chapter on superstitions, we saw that people are polite to computers because our brains do not differentiate between digital media and human companions. We treat computers as people because technology outpaces human evolution. And superstitions are triggered among online gamers the same way that superstitions are triggered in Skinner’s pigeons. This is the same logic that underlies all the studies in virtual environments presented in this chapter. Our brains are harried, overworked processors, besieged by constant information deluges. The automated rules that our brains use to cope with making decisions in everyday life don’t care about the media we’re using. Our brains make sense of virtual people using the same rules they use for making sense of physical people. When a person looks similar to us, whether we’re face-to-face or in a virtual world, we automatically like him or her more.
The difference, of course, is that virtual worlds are infinitely malleable in a way that the physical world is not. There’s very little I can do to make myself look more like someone else in the real world, but in the virtual world, this is trivial. Would you like that order of face stealing at 20 percent or 30 percent? This malleability is what allows our cognitive heuristics to be mercilessly hijacked in virtual worlds. Whether it is a manipulation in face stealing or avatar appearance, these undetected changes cause dramatic shifts in behavior both inside and outside of the virtual world. Even the object of our own creation in virtual worlds, our own avatars, can become a tool for behavioral modification. These fantasy worlds of escape can ironically make us susceptible to powerful psychological tools that silently modify our behaviors and attitudes.