SmartMobs: Social interactions in online virtual environments
(via Smartmobs)
This Nature article says “according to a study of social interactions in one online world, some quirks of how people interact in the real world have survived the digital transition.While that may put a dampener on visions of online liberation, it’s good news for social scientists. They say that, if social rules map over into artificial realities, virtual worlds will offer a new platform for doing experiments.Psychologists have long known that unwritten rules govern our social interactions. Some researchers have found that women stand closer together than men when talking, for example. Men are also less likely to maintain eye contact. And both sexes will reduce eye contact if the person they are talking to gets too close.Now similar behaviour has been observed in Second Life, an online world that has been publically available since 2003.
Second Life is a virtual reality that now has some 660,000 residents. Users create a personal ‘avatar’,a representation of themselves,and can wander around the apparent physical environment of this online world, encountering other avatars or objects. Residents have set up everything from museums to shops of virtual goods, such as digital furniture, which other users spend real money on. Universities have opened online campuses, and there has been a proliferation of virtual sex clubs.
With thousands of people using Second Life at any one time, Nick Yee and colleagues at Stanford University realised it presented a chance to assess whether users interacted in similar ways to people in the real world. After using a computer program to monitor the behaviour of over 1,600 avatars in one-on-one interactions, they conclude that the answer is ‘yes’. Male avatars (whether created by a man or a woman) stood further apart than female avatars, for instance, and were more likely to avert their gaze. And when an avatar gets within a few metres of another, the user reduces eye contact by moving their character to face slightly to the right or the left of the other ‘person’.”Social interactions in the online virtual environments such as Second Life are governed by the same social norms as social interactions in the physical world,” Yee and colleagues conclude in a paper in press at CyberPsychology and Behaviour”.
