Now that Americans are hanging around virtual
worlds almost as much (it seems) as the real one, research on how we
behave in places like Second Life and how things like our choice of
avatar spills over into the real world is heating up. As I described in a
column last February, players who had super-attractive avatars have an
exaggerated view of their real-world appearance and act accordingly. For
instance, they believe that especially attractive men or women whose
faces they’re shown from an online dating site would be interested in
them. (When you have a more realistic view of your attractiveness, you
dial down your expectations.) Now a study finds an uglier side to
avatars: they display racist attitudes just as real people in the real
world do. In the experiment that Paul W. Eastwick and Wendi L. Gardner of Northwestern University describe in a paper called “Is It a Game? Evidence for Social Influence in the Virtual World,”
published online in the journal Social Influence, one avatar asked
another if he would teleport to Duda Beach (one of the sites in the virtual world There.com)
with her and let her take a screenshot of him. (The him’s and her’s are
interchangeable here; the scientists used male and female avatars in
various permutations.) The avatar was more likely to agree if that request had been preceded
by a more unreasonable one: teleporting to 50 locations with her to
take screenshots. That would have required about two hours of
teleporting and traveling—an unreasonable request. When the one-beach
request was presented alone, players were less likely to say okay. What seems to happen—and this is true in real life as well—is that
when you reject one request, and the requester then makes a second, more
moderate one, you reciprocate what you perceive as her “concession” by
going from brushing her off to acquiescing. Then the scientists gave the avatar making the request dark skin.
While white avatars got about 20 percent more of those they asked to
agree to the modest request after the unreasonable one, the increase for
the dark-toned avatars was only 8 percent. Even when the avatars
modified what they were asking, players still mostly brushed them off. Again back in the real world, decades of psychology studies have
shown that whether or not someone agrees to a request under these
experimental conditions—and also in real life—depends on whether they
think the requester is worthy of impressing, For dark-skin avatars,
apparently, the answer is, not so much. I should add that the players
knew they were part of a psych study; not even that had a significant
effect on (let's just say it) racism. “You would think when you’re wandering around this fantasyland, operating outside of the normal laws of time, space and gravity and meeting all types of strange characters, that you might behave differently,” Eastwick said. “But people exhibited the same type of behavior, and the same type of racial bias, that they show in the real world all the time,” where people are more uncomfortable with minorities and less likely to help them. |