Virtual worlds, attitude changes and persuasion power

Very interesting discoveries in the fields of psychology and persuasion:

ELECTABLE LIKE ME: The power of
digital imaging raises the specter of manipulation. When photos of
undecided voters were partially morphed into those of candidates, the
voters would prefer a candidate with whom they’d been melded, but could
not detect that the photo contained their own face.

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STANFORD Magazine: January/February 2008 > Features > Virtual Reality

Courtesy Virtual Human Interaction LabThis form of pretending is so powerful that what happens online doesn’t necessarily stay online, Bailenson argues. Experiments in his lab have shown that what you experience as your digital doppelgänger lingers after you power down the PC—and bleeds into your real-life identity, at least for a while. His Stanford research team has begun exploring how those virtual experiences might be used to tweak who you are, for better or worse.


Bailenson’s lab has found, you can make your avatar seem to gaze at
multiple people; they’ll pay more attention than they would in a
face-to-face conversation, and be twice as likely to agree with you.

Yee describes an experiment in which people who were given taller
avatars behaved more aggressively in a virtual bargaining task than
people with shorter avatars. When the subjects later repeated the task
with a real person, “people who had been in taller avatars continued to
bargain more aggressively face-to-face.”

  • seeing Future Me made Present Me worry about retirement for weeks afterward. Ersner-Hershfield imagines that if bonding with your futurized image
    encourages saving, retirement planners or banks might be able to use a
    less-intrusive application—say, by virtually aging a photo that clients
    upload to a website—to spur Americans’ moribund saving habits.

  • subjects who watch their own avatar run on a treadmill are more active
    the next day than subjects who see a stranger’s avatar run, or who see
    themselves stand still.
  • Ahn: because people tend to take what they see online at face value,
    can their behavior be shaped by deliberately false information? Ahn’s
    developing a test in which subjects’ faces are Photoshopped directly
    into ads, or partially morphed with the faces of other endorsers.

The implications of this kind of work are mind-boggling and a little
creepy: is this online game of let’s pretend ultimately empowering,
because we can be anything we want, or potentially sinister, because we
can be so easily manipulated by unseen hands?

January 13, 2008 · Filed Under Business, Future, Power Phrases, Persuasion, Society, Technology

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