The Proteus Paradox

by Nick Yee

  22. The anecdote from the Difference Engine Initiative reported in Stephanie Fisher and Alison Harvey, “Intervention for Inclusivity: Gender Politics and Indie Game Development,” Loading . . . Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association 7 (2013): 25–40. Gabrielle Toledano, “Women and Video Gaming’s Dirty Little Secrets,” Forbes, January 18, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswomanfiles/2013/01/18/women-and-video-gamings-dirty-little-secrets/

  Chapter Seven. The “Impossible” Romance

  1. Lindsy Van Gelder, “Strange Case of the Electronic Lover,” Ms. 14 (1985): 94, 99, 101–104, 117, 123, 124.

  2. T. L. Taylor, Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 52. Pew Internet survey results from M. Madden and A. Lenhart, “Online Dating,” Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006), available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2006/Online-Dating.aspx. Online relationships formation statistics from M. Rosenfeld, “Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary,” American Sociological Review 77 (2012): 523–547.

  3. See the following surveys of online relationships: Nick Yee, “The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments,” Presence 15 (2006): 309–329; Nick Yee, “Love Is in the Air,” The Daedalus Project (2006): http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001528.php; and Helena Cole and Mark D. Griffiths, “Social Interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 10 (2007): 575–583.

  4. Some guilds span multiple online games, and members can thus remain in the same guild even when they’re playing a different game.

  5. Todd Krieger, “Love and Money,” Wired, March 9, 1995.

  6. See Russ V. Reynolds, J. Regis McNamara, Richard J. Marion, and David L. Tobin, “Computerized Service Delivery in Clinical Psychology,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 16 (1985): 339–353; Malcolm R. Parks and Kory Floyd, “Making Friends in Cyberspace,” Journal of Communication 46 (1996): 80–97; Yee, “Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences”; and Joseph B. Walther, “Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction,” Communication Research 23 (1996): 3–43.

  7. Susan M. Wildermuth and Sally Vogl-Bauer, “We Met on the Net: Exploring the Perceptions of Online Romantic Relationships Participants,” Southern Communication Journal 72 (2007): 211–227.

  8. Katelyn Y. A. McKenna and John A. Bargh, “Plan 9 from Cyberspace: The Implications of the Internet for Personality and Social Psychology,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 4 (2000): 57–75.

  9. Mark Seal, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor (New York: Viking Adult, 2011).

  10. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 69.

  11. Eli J. Finkel et al., “Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13 (2012): 3–66.

  Chapter Eight. Tools of Persuasion and Control

  1. Linden Labs, “Factsheet: The Technology behind the Second Life Platform,” http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/general/factsheets/technology.

  2. Charles A. Nelson, “The Development and Neural Bases of Face Recognition,” Infant and Child Development 10 (2001): 3–18. See also Carolyn C. Goren, Merrill Sarty, and Paul Y. K. Wu, “Visual Following and Pattern Discrimination of Face-Like Stimuli by Newborn Infants,” Pediatrics 56 (1975): 544–549.

  3. Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield Walster, Interpersonal Attraction (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1979). Also see James Shanteau and Geraldine F. Nagy, “Probability of Acceptance in Dating Choice,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 522–533.

  4. Jerry M. Burger et al., “What a Coincidence! The Effects of Incidental Similarity on Compliance,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (2004): 35–43.

  5. See Experiment 2 reported in Jeremy N. Bailenson, Shanto Iyengar, Nick Yee, and Nathan A. Collins, “Facial Similarity between Voters and Candidates Causes Influence,” Public Opinion Quarterly 72 (2008): 935–961.

  6. Our first study used undergraduate students and less well known political candidates: Jeremy N. Bailenson, Philip Garland, Shanto Iyengar, and Nick Yee, “Transformed Facial Similarity as a Political Cue: A Preliminary Investigation,” Political Science 27 (2006): 373–386. Then we followed up with three studies using nationally representative voting-age US citizens in Bailenson, Iyengar, Yee, and Collins, “Facial Similarity between Voters and Candidates.”

  7. Jeremy N. Bailenson et al., “The Use of Immersive Virtual Reality in the Learning Science: Digital Transformations of Teachers, Students, and Social Context,” Journal of the Learning Science 17 (2008): 102–141.

  8. Valins’s bogus heartbeat study is reported in Stuart Valins, “Cognitive Effects of False Heart-Rate Feedback,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4 (1966): 400–408. For the original formulation of self-perception theory, see Daryl J. Bem, “Self-Perception Theory,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 6, ed. Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 1–62.

  9. Donald G. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron, “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction under Conditions of High Anxiety,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30 (1974): 510–517.

  10. Mark G. Frank and Thomas Gilovich, “The Dark Side of Self and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sports,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 74–85.

  11. The seminal paper linking attractiveness with positive perceptions is Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster, “What Is Beautiful Is Good,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 285–290. The large meta-analytic review of hundreds of papers on attractiveness is reported in Judith H. Langlois et al., “Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review,” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 390–423. The jury sentencing example comes from Harold Sigall and Nancy Ostrove, “Beautiful but Dangerous: Effects of Offender Attractiveness and Nature of the Crime on Juridic Judgment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31 (1975): 410–414.

  12. See study one in Nick Yee and Jeremy N. Bailenson, “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior,” Human Communication Research 33 (2007): 271–290.

  13. For an example of a study that links height with perceived competence, see Thomas J. Young and Laurence A. French, “Height and Perceived Competence of U.S. Presidents,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 82 (1996): 1002. The large-sample regression model of the impact of height on income is reported in Timothy A. Judge and Daniel M. Cable, “The Effect of Physical Height on Workplace Success and Income: Preliminary Test of a Theoretical Model,” Journal of Applied Psychology 89 (2004): 428–441. The exact estimated impact of each inch of increase in height on annual earning is $789 (435).

  14. See study two in Yee and Bailenson, “Proteus Effect.”

  15. Nick Yee, Jeremy N. Bailenson, and Nicolas Ducheneaut, “The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-Representation on Online and Offline Behavior,” Communication Research 36 (2009): 285–312.

  16. For retirement savings estimates, see Diana Ferrell et al., Talkin’ ’bout My Generation: The Economic Impact of Aging US Baby Boomers (McKinsey Global Institute, 2008); and Ruth Helman et al., The 2012 Retirement Confidence Survey: Job Insecurity, Debt Weigh on Retirement Confidence, Savings (Employee Benefit Research Institute, 2012).

  17. Hal E. Hershfield et al., “Increasing Saving Behavior through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self,” Journal of Marketing Research 48 (2011): S23–S37.

  18. Jesse Fox and Jeremy N. Bailenson, “Virtual Self-Modeling: The Effects of Vicarious Reinforcement and Identification on Exercise Behaviors,” Media Psychology 12 (2009): 1–25.

&nbs
p; Chapter Nine. Introverted Elves, Conscientious Gnomes, and the Quest for Big Data

  1. The four papers generated from the early PlayOn data were Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert Moore, “Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Games,” Proceedings of CHI 2006 (2006): 407–416; Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert Moore, “Building an MMO with Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft,” Games and Culture 1 (2006): 281–317; Dmitri Williams et al., “From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft,” Games and Culture 1 (2006): 338–361; and Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert Moore, “The Life and Death of Online Gaming Communities: A Look at Guilds in World of Warcraft,” Proceedings of CHI 2007 (2007): 839–848.

  2. See John P. Robinson, Phillip R. Shaver, and Lawrence S. Wrightsman, Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Attitudes, vol. 1: Measures of Social Psychological Attitudes (New York: Academic Press, 1991); and Oliver P. John and Sanjay Srivastava, “The Big Five Trait Taxonomy: History, Measurement, and Theoretical Perspectives,” Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, ed. Lawrence A. Pervin and Oliver P. John (New York: Guilford, 1999), 102–138. See also Lewis R. Goldberg, “A Historical Survey of Personality Scales and Inventories,” in Advances in Psychological Assessment, vol. 1, ed. Paul McReynolds (Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books, 1975), 293–336.

  3. See John and Srivastava, “Big Five Trait Taxonomy,” for a wonderful historical and conceptual overview of Big Five development. For all that the Big Five model has done to unify the field and advance personality research, it’s still important to acknowledge its weaknesses. See, e.g., Jack Block, “The Five-Factor Framing of Personality and Beyond: Some Ruminations,” Psychological Inquiry 21 (2010): 2–25. In particular, certain traits that are well captured in the English language are not in the Big Five, including honesty, masculinity-femininity, humor or wit, and sensuality.

  4. For earlier studies involving personality assessment among strangers, see David C. Funder and Carl D. Sneed, “Behavioral Manifestations of Personality: An Ecological Approach to Judgmental Accuracy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 479–490; and David A. Kenny, Caryl Horner, Deborah A. Kashy, and Ling-chuan Chu, “Consensus at Zero Acquaintance: Replication, Behavioral Cues, and Stability,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (1992): 88–97. The study on personality expression in bedrooms and offices is reported in Samuel D. Gosling, Sei Jin Ko, Thomas Mannarelli, and Margaret E. Morris, “A Room with a Cue: Judgments of Personality Based on Offices and Bedrooms,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82 (2002): 379–398.

  5. For personal websites, see Simine Vazire and Samuel D. Gosling, “e-Perceptions: Personality Impressions Based on Personal Websites,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87 (2004): 123–132. For Facebook profiles, see Mitja D. Back et al., “Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, not Self-Idealization,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 372–374. For email content, see Alastair J. Gill, Jon Oberlander, and Elizabeth Austin, “Rating E-Mail Personality at Zero Acquaintance,” Personality and Individual Differences 40 (2006): 497–507. For email addresses, see Mitja D. Back, Stefan C. Schmukle, and Boris Egloff, “How Extraverted Is honey.bunny77@ hotmail.de? Inferring Personality from E-Mail Addresses,” Journal of Research in Personality 42 (2008): 1116–1122.

  6. Dmitry Nozhnin, “Predicting Churn: Data-Mining Your Game,” Gama Sutra, May 17, 2012, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/170472/predicting_churn_datamining_your_.php.

  7. Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Les Nelson, and Peter Likarish, “Introverted Elves and Conscientious Gnomes: The Expression of Personality in World of War-craft,” Proceedings of CHI 2011 (2011): 753–762.

  8. Charles Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” New York Times, February 16, 2012.

  9. Machine learning analysis of this data set was reported in Peter Likarish et al., “Demographic Profiling from MMOG Gameplay” (Paper presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, 2011). The specific rules we list here in the book chapter were not reported in that paper. These rules were derived using an association rule mining algorithm in the Weka toolkit called HotSpot. Peter Steiner’s well-known cartoon was published in the New Yorker on July 5, 1993. The indoor gardening story is reported in Heather Hollingsworth, “Kansas Couple: Indoor Gardening Prompted Pot Raid,” Associated Press, March 29, 2013.

  10. For more on the “digital enclosure,” see Mark Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” Communication Review 10 (2007): 295–317. Screenshots of the Naked Gnome Protest, along with the account suspension message, can be found at: http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/491.

  Chapter Ten. Changing the Rules

  Epigraph: Lawrence Lessig, Code (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 58–59.

  1. The wallet-dropping experiments are reported in Mark D. West, “Losers: Recovering Lost Property in Japan and the United States,” Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper No. 02-005 (2002), available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=316119. Tsunamic recovery statistics reported in Tom Miyagawa Coulton and John M. Glionna, “Japanese Return Cash Recovered after Tsunami,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2011.

  2. Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment (New York: Wiley, 1968). For an interactionist approach, see Allan R. Buss, “The Trait-Situation Controversy and the Concept of Interaction,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 3 (1977): 196–201.

  3. Nick Yee, “Time Spent in the Meta-Game,” The Daedalus Project (2006).

  4. Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore, “‘Alone Together?’ Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Games,” Proceedings of CHI 1 (2006): 407–416.

  5. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 19.

  Chapter Eleven. The Hidden Logic of Avatars

  1. See Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, Infinite Reality: The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), for the historical background of and current research in virtual reality.

  2. Barlow’s documentation of his virtual reality experience can be found in John Perry Barlow, Being in Nothingness: Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace (n.d.), available from: http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/JohnePerryeBarlow/HTML/beingeinenothingness.html. The counterculture’s fascination with technology is documented in Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). For a fascinating account of how the counterculture gave rise to personal computing, see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  3. William Swartout et al., “Simulation Meets Hollywood: Integrating Graphics, Sound, Story and Character for Immersive Simulation,” Multimodal Intelligent Information Presentation Series: Text, Speech and Language Technology 27 (2005): 297–303.

  4. Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read, Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2009).

  5. Philip Rosedale, “Second Life: What Do We Learn If We Digitize Everything?” (Paper presented at the Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, November 30, 2006, video of the talk available at: http://longnow.org/seminars/02006/). For the schizophrenia simulation in Second Life, see Jane Elliott, “What’s It Like to Have Schizophrenia?” BBC News, March 19, 2007, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6453241.stm.

  6. Pavel Curtis and David A. Nichols, “MUDs Grow Up: Social Virtual Reality in the Real World,” Xerox PARC, January 19, 1993, available at: http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/MOO_MUD_IRC/muds_grow_up.paper.

  7. Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” Village Voice, December 23, 1993.

  8. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Vintage
, 2011), 10.

  9. Raph Koster, MUD Influence, June 27, 2008, at: http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/06/27/mud-influence/.

  10. Jaron Lanier, “Homuncular Flexibility,” Edge, January 1, 2006, available at: http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html#lanier.

  Chapter Twelve. Reflections and the Future of Virtual Worlds

  1. See Eric T. Lofgren and Nina H. Fefferman, “The Untapped Potential of Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on Real World Epidemics,” Lancet Infectious Diseases 7 (2007): 625–629; and Edward Castronova, “Virtual Worlds: Petri Dishes, Rat Mazes, and Supercolliders,” Games and Culture 4 (2009): 396–407.

  2. Jon A. Krosnick, Joanne M. Miller, and Michael P. Tichy, “An Unrecognized Need for Ballot Reform: Effects of Candidate Name Order,” in Rethinking the Vote: The Politics and Prospects of American Election Reform, ed. Ann N. Crigler, Marion R. Just, and Edward J. McCaffery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 51–74.

  3. Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002).

  4. For more on the connections between the military and the entertainment industry, see Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood, “Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex,” in Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Bühne—Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Jan Lazardig, Helmar Schramm, and Ludger Scharte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003).