NMC Campus Observer

Personal Space Issues in SL

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Sep 13, 2006 10:18pm

A new article in Nature, Concept of ‘personal space’ survives in virtual reality, summarizes some fascninating research from Stanford researchers that suggest body language, eye contact, and physical space known in the real world are replicated with the same gender differences in Second Life:

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.

What does this mean for learning in Second Life? Are shy students still shy? Will cheaters in real world cheat in Second Life? Is bullying happening? Is this surprising? A bad thing or not?

And does this give anyone ideas for using Second Life for social or psychological research?

For more, see the original paper by Nick Yee et al, The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Normas in nline Virtual Environments [PDF]

Story filed under: Second Life News

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