Word: behaviorism
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...took quite a long time. There was much less knowledge in the '80s and '90s, when I was developing my bipolar, before it became extreme. I went through therapist after therapist, and finally it was when I had just gotten married for the first time, my behavior was just totally out of control. I was aware that it wasn't reasonable anymore...
...didn't realize how instructive my sister's question was until recently, when I discovered research being done at Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL). Jeremy Bailenson, head of the lab and an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, studies the way self-perception affects behavior. No surprise that what we think about ourselves affects the confidence with which we approach the world. What is a surprise is that this applies in the virtual world too. With my plain=Jane avatar and my inexperience in Second Life, I did what most people would want...
...experiment, published in Human Communication Research last year, researchers assessed how an avatar's attractiveness affected human behavior, both online and off. Thirty-two volunteers were randomly assigned an attractive or unattractive avatar (attractiveness was rated by undergrads in a survey beforehand) and instructed to look at them in a virtual mirror for 90 seconds. Then they were asked to interact with other avatars, controlled by the experimenters, in a classroom-like setting. Overall, subjects using good-looking avatars tended to display more confidence, friendliness and extroversion, just as in the real world: they approached avatar strangers within three feet...
Again, the behavior held up in real life. When Yee had the subjects shed their avatars and negotiate face-to-face, sitting down, people who had inhabited tall avatars bargained more aggressively, suggesting unfair splits more often. And participants who had had short avatars accepted less-than-even money more often than the tall ones. How tall the people were themselves became less important, if only temporarily, than the height of their online alter egos...
...Virtual behavior may even affect real-world health. Stanford graduate student Jesse Fox randomly assigned avatars to 75 volunteers and divided them into three groups: one group watched their look-alike avatars run on treadmills for about five and a half minutes; another group saw their virtual counterparts lounge around; and a third watched avatars who did not look like them, but were of the same age and sex, run on treadmills. A day later, Fox found that participants who watched avatars of their own likeness exercising had themselves exercised an hour more in the intervening 24-hour period than...