The Proteus Paradox (19 page)

We also know that an unruly student can distract other students in a classroom. In a virtual classroom, the king can automatically censor the unruly behavior, splicing in a loop of recorded good behavior from a moment ago and projecting that instead to the other students. By placing students in a roomful of perfectly attentive students, we increase the likelihood that each student conforms to that model behavior. These superpowers could be combined to create the perfect virtual classroom. Indeed, my colleagues and I at Stanford have created these very virtual classrooms, placed students in them, and found that they improved learning.
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This broken reality also reveals the true power of face stealing. In a virtual world, a presenter's avatar could be individually blended with each audience member. Audience members each see their own version of reality in which the presenter looks subtly like them. In virtual worlds, political candidates can literally have a thousand faces. And of course, face morphing is only one of many possibly transformations. A benevolent king could create the perfect classroom, but a more devious king might create persuasion chambers tailored to each audience member. The devious king would steal part of your face and maintain eye contact with you while you sit front and center. And of course, the king's teeth will also be that impossible shade of brilliant white.

In 1966, psychologist Stuart Valins conducted a lab experiment in which male undergraduate students were asked to look at models
from a
Playboy
magazine while they were hooked up to a machine that amplified their heartbeat and made it audible. The students were told that the experiment was a study of physiological reactions to visual stimuli. Of course, because this was a psychological experiment, the machine wasn't actually amplifying their heartbeat. It wasn't recording anything at all. Instead, the heartbeat noises had been prerecorded and were being played back by the machine. When the students were looking at some of the models, they would hear their “heartbeat” increase noticeably. At the end of the study, the students were asked to rate the attractiveness of each model. The students rated models randomly paired with an increased heartbeat as being more attractive.

But why should a bogus heartbeat influence how students rated the models? Wouldn't the students have formed an impression of each model based solely on the photograph? Deciphering our own emotions and attitudes is not straightforward; we do not keep an up-to-date reference list of our attitudes toward every person, situation, or social issue we might encounter. In many cases, our own thoughts are a black box, even to ourselves. We do this self-deciphering without conscious thought because this is how we understand other people. We don't have direct access to other people's inner thoughts and must infer their attitudes based on how they behave. Whenever Sam comes home, the first thing he does is sit down in front of the TV and play video games. He probably likes video games. Whenever the art lesson starts, Rachel slumps in her chair and frowns. She probably doesn't like art lessons. In the same way that we use other people's behavior to infer their attitudes, we do the same with our own black box. We unconsciously and automatically observe our own behaviors to make sense of how we feel about something. Thus, in Valins's study, the students notice their rapid heartbeat, and since the only
stimulus in the room is the
Playboy
model, it must be the cause of their arousal. And if they are aroused, the model must be very attractive. This self-perception theory reverses our intuitive understanding of how our brains work. Our behavior isn't directed by our attitudes. It's the other way around. Our behaviors direct our attitudes.
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Of course, real life is never as sterile as a psychology lab. The cause of our excitement or sadness at any given moment can be ambiguous and difficult to pinpoint, especially in the typical data deluge our brains receive. This leads to many interesting accidents. The Capilano Suspension Bridge is a 5-foot-wide, 450-foot-long pedestrian bridge that stretches over the Capilano River in North Vancouver, British Columbia, with a 230-foot drop to the rocks and rapids below. The low handrails and the bridge's tendency to tilt and wobble as one crosses it create the constant impression that one is about to fall. In 1974, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron conducted a study on the bridge specifically because of its “arousal-inducing features.” A solid wood bridge conveniently located upriver served as the control condition. On each of the two bridges, a female research assistant approached male tourists as they approached the midpoint of the bridge and asked them to fill out a questionnaire for her psychology class. When the tourists finished the questionnaire, the research assistant gave them her phone number and told them to call her later if they wanted to know more about the study. Tourists who met the female assistant on the suspension bridge were more likely to call her afterward than were the tourists who met her on the solid bridge. In Valins's bogus heartbeat study, the students attributed their arousal to the photograph. In the bridge study, the arousal caused by crossing a shaky bridge was incorrectly attributed to presence of the female assistant. This caused the men to be more attracted to the female assistant and thus more likely to call her later.
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We decipher our own attitudes based not only on what we do but also on what we wear. In the mid-1980s, psychologists Mark Frank and Thomas Gilovich tabulated past records from the National Football League and the National Hockey League. They discovered that teams wearing black uniforms received more penalties than teams wearing uniforms of other colors. Because teams change uniform color depending on where they play, Frank and Gilovich were able to show that when the same team wore black uniforms, it received more penalties. They also found that people perceive players in black uniforms as being more aggressive on the field. This led them to wonder if wearing a black uniform made players more aggressive via self-perception. To exclude the possibility of referee bias, they conducted a lab experiment. They brought students into the lab in groups of three, randomly assigned each group either black or white uniforms, and led the students to believe that they would be competing against another team of students preparing in another room. Each group then saw a list of twelve games from which to choose the five they wished to compete against the other team in. Frank and Gilovich found that study participants given black uniforms selected more aggressive games than participants given white uniforms. In their words, “Just as observers see those in black uniforms as tough, mean, and aggressive, so too does the person wearing that uniform.”
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By 2005, I had worked with Bailenson for two years, exploring how transformations in virtual worlds could grant social superpowers—how a digital transformation could influence people's interactions. I began to wonder if there was anything to the flipside of that question. Your avatar in a virtual world or online game is like a super uniform. It is infinitely more fluid and encompassing than a black outfit. Your age, your gender, and your body proportions are all things that are easily modified in a virtual world. And if a simple
black uniform can make someone more aggressive in a laboratory, what happens to you when you are put into a digital avatar?

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.
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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.
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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.
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