I came across a discussion of the paper The unbearable likeness of being digital: The persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments, by Nick Yee, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Mark Urbanek, Francis Chang and Dan Merget, published in Cyber…

I think the opposite is quite more appealing to be researched. I think I would try to create some experiment where I show people Screenshots of people in SL standing around and let them evaluate and describe the situations seen. I think the same way as Prokofy Neva who stated “Avatars can’t see!”. I think this is really the point here: People are looking towards a screen and they arrange some figure of a human. So they place this figure according to their specific understanding of what kind of proximity might be adequate.

This is the closest you can get to evaluating behaviour of people in SL, I think. There is no “Me having a valid gaze.” there is in the best case a Screen on which I arrange an avatar to match certain criteria I have on my mind to reach certain things.

As of the gender issue… I also wrote some words over on my blog mentioning “the Turing Game”.
details here: http://www.ifeb.uni-bremen.de/wordpress_staedtler/?p=108

It might be possible, that you could resolve the gender-issue completely by just analyzing the chat-transcripts. So the gender issue might perhaps be completely resolved, as experiments in the Turing Game have showed people are pretty good at finding out about the others’ gender, so why should a group of scientists e.g. be worse at this question.

regards, Helge

On the other hand, I think the norm transfer hypothesis is the most parsimonious explanation for our set of findings currently. Sometimes, people interact in SL the ways they are used to interacting in RL. The problem with the “mimicry” hypothesis is that most people aren’t consciously aware of personal space and eye gaze norms. Also, saying that people “mimic RL norms” is incredibly close to saying people “follow RL norms” in SL. There will always be alternative explanations for every observed phenomenon – whether this is global warming, or interpersonal distance in SL. Only future studies can test out the alternatives, and unfortunately science seldom provides instant gratification or conclusive answers.

“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. This finding has significant implications for using virtual worlds to study human social interaction. If people behave according to the same social rules in both physical and virtual worlds even though the mode of movement and navigation is entirely different (i.e., using keyboard and mouse as opposed to bodies and legs), then this means it is possible to study social interaction in virtual environments and generalize them to social interaction in the real world.”

That is the quote that Fiend led with above and I guess I agree with him that it is *way* too strong given the evidence on the table, which just speaks to distance and gaze. How do we get from that to the more general claim 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”

or

“this means it is possible to study social interaction in virtual environments and generalize them to social interaction in the real world”?

It doesn’t mean anything of the sort. That would be a grand generalization from a narrow class of facts relating to gaze and distance. There is no prima facie reason to expect similar results with respect other social facts (especially since you concede that the causal mechanisms are different). It’s perfectly fine to offer a hypothesis that this pattern will recur with other social facts, and it will be interesting to test it, but it is a mistake to conclude that “it is possible to study social interaction in virtual environments and generalize them to social interaction in the real world”. It is way too early to *conclude* that, however.

Finally, we don’t actually know that the gaze and distance results are because of the same norms at all. The online behavior might not be norm goverened at all, or the relevant norm might be be “mimick RL as much as you can” — in effect the same norm that applies when people make their guns and prim hair look as realistic as possible, which is not the same norm as “respect personal space.”

Urizenus – I think your comments are a rephrasing of the observed findings vs. mechanics issue. What we found was that many RL norms seem to reappear in SL. We actually don’t argue for why this happens. Now, this may be because social norms are engrained, because people are role-playing, or other factors, but we don’t make any claims to the causal mechanism. Our main claims from the paper, supported by a large data set, was that several social norms related to personal distance and gaze transfer to SL. We don’t claim that all RL norms transfer. We don’t claim we know precisely why this happens. And this was what the press reported on. Male avatars in SL stand further away from other male avatars than they do from female avatars (among several other findings).

You say that these classes of behavior haven’t even been studied in virtual worlds yet, but that’s actually what we did. We were studying personal space and gaze in SL. The findings could have turned out very different from RL norms, half-half, or produced findings that required a new theory of social interaction, but they didn’t. They came out congruent with RL norms.

Your comments also point to the most interesting aspect of the findings. SL users use the mouse and keyboard to move their avatars, so there’s no reason why SL avatars would follow RL norms, and yet we still find from a large data set that SL avatars behave as if they were following RL social norms. We didn’t extrapolate strong conclusions. We simply stated what we found. Personal space norms in SL seem to mirror RL norms.

Yes, it is a really interesting question as to why male avatars establish greater distance than female avatars and an equally interesting question as to why male avatars maintain less eye contact. But how do we get from those very interesting questions to the very strong conclusion that we can extrapolate results about the behavior of different genders (or other groups) in RL from the analogous presented differences online?

The questions that Fiend is raising all go to the following point: the underlying causal mechanisms involved in RL gaze and distance are radically different from the underlying causal mechanisms involved in the avatar gaze and distance. So extrapolating strong conclusions here just doesn’t fly — particularly extrapolating conclusions that generalize to classes of behavior that we haven’t even studied in a virtual setting yet.

It seems to me that there are numerous explanatory possibilities that haven’t been explored yet, not least of which is that distance and gaze are easily manipulated elements of gender roleplay (as, I suppose, voice pitch modulation would be). There are many other facts about RL gender difference that are not so obvious and easily mimicked, so it would be careless to think that online gender differences will encode those facts, that is all.

In other words, while it is true that avatars in SL can IM with others 30 feet away and their avatars may not be facing what they’re paying attention to, we’re still left with these questions among others:

- Why is it that male avatars stand further away from other male avatars than from female avatars?
- Why is it that male avatars maintain less eye contact with other male avatars than with female avatars?

And while some of the factors others have brought up clearly add to the noise in the data, and we clearly don’t understand everything about personal space and gaze in Second Life, that the most parsimonious epxlanation for our findings is that some social norms from our physical world transfer into virtual worlds.

What we’ve found in these experimental studies (as opposed to the observational study reported here) is that people do conform to traits of their avatars very quickly (within a 1-3 minute timeframe).

Of course, it’s impossible to elucidate all aspects of personal space and virtual gender-bending with one study, and this wasn’t the purpose of this paper. And much as Andy is suggesting, we are approaching this issue from many angles, with several methodologies. Seldom does one study provide anything definitive. It takes time and a series of studies to figure out what is going on and you can get a sense of that by looking through other studies we have done: http://vhil.stanford.edu

Guess there is a bandwagon tendency in a lot of this stuff. Often they are just muddying the waters rather than bringing clarity.

People seem to be walking right out of their own disciplines into areas where they know little or nothing and asking lots of questions without getting the background thinking basics, which may be well established though not necessarily within the terminological sphere they are use and understand. That is, they may need, for example, crash courses in social psychology, game theory and so on.
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I think everyone should read the Extended Phenotype!
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In my view it is the philosophy first: what can you ask? Then the science. The logic and programming just go on all by themselves! If you can create the software and it works, people use it often in imaginative ways the designers hadn’t thought of. An example: plagiarism software is used by many higher education establishments to deal with the cut and paste culture of the modern student. But it can also be used by anyone with online content to see how his/her stuff is spreading online.
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The debate above has highlighted the fact that a cyberworld is a restricted model of RW. There may come a time when RW=VR. That’s when they won’t need Hollywood superstars!

The business of whether we can lump together RW and online world (are there any things in OLW which are extra, over and above RW; is it a metaphorical web or not? ,and so on, need to be carefully analysed.)
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There are many other areas which could help such as value networks, and aspects of game theory.

This 1996 piece: Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community

< http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html#30835 >

< http://yudkowsky.net/virtues/ >