On the Internet we are used to behaving worse than in the real worldto write things that we would never say, even to lie and maybe to pretend who we are not: it is not new, it has been more or less always, even more so since the arrival of Facebook and other social networks. The expression keyboard lion it was created precisely to describe this type of attitude.
The novelty is that in the metaverse (things?)and in general in virtual worlds, the situation will not only not improve but will probably get worse, unless some countermeasures are taken. Which is something that could have been imagined a little, but which is now demonstrated by a study conducted by the Italian Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Sapienza University and the Santa Lucia Foundation, whose results have been published on iScience (here).
Mixed reality
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More dishonest in the metaverse
To understand this, IIT’s Neuroscience & Society research team, led by Salvatore Maria Aglioti, conducted a simple but significant experiment: he developed a videogame in a virtual environment in which the various participants had to compete in pairs in a card game to win real money. According to the rules, the first player had to draw one of two hole cards, knowing that one determined the victory and the other the defeat. The point is that however, the drawn card was only shown to the second player (to his avatar, that is), who could eventually decide to lie and favor himself, aware that no one would find out if he decided to cheat.
The other decisive point is that the second player was carrying on the game a different levels of identification with the avatar he controlled, which from time to time was gradually more realistic: the idea was to vary the so-called sense of body ownership (in English, sense of body ownership), creating a more or less strong bond with the virtual version of himself, to understand if this influenced the choices. Which actually happened: from what emerged, the decrease in the sense of belonging of the body is associated with more selfish choices and incorrect, which increase as the stakes increase. Put simply: the less realistic our avatar is, the less we feel represented by him and the more we are willing to make morally questionable choices.
Interview
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How to improve and why it is important
In addition to bringing out the problem, the study also implicitly revealed the solution: if the question is linked to SOO, that is the ability to identify with the digital alter ego, it is clear that “to decrease dishonest behavior in future virtual worldswe could think of systems that increase our sense of bodily belonging, implementing graphic and technological interventions on the most commonly used virtual reality devices ”, as explained by Aglioti.
The technological obstacle is an obstacle of which they are well aware even in Meta, which among the companies is definitely the one most committed to the construction of the metaverse: after many criticisms received for the (poor) graphics quality of the avatars that they are populating Horizon Worlds, Zuckerberg himself announced that “we can do much more, and we will grow up soon”. Reading the IIT study, we understand that it is not just an aesthetic question: the researcher Marina Scattolin he recalled that “the results are particularly relevant in this historical moment, in which we observe the online transposition of many daily activities such as meetings, thesis discussions, examinations and job interviews (e pure medical therapiesed) ”and precisely that“ understanding how our behavior could change in telepresence contexts or within the metaverse or other digitally reconstructed worlds is of fundamental importance for social life ”.
In short: if really, within the next decade or so, virtual environments will take the place of the Internet as we know it and will conquer an increasingly large slice of our lives, it is already essential that they are built well and that they are as realistic as possible. So as to remind those who frequent them that those around them they look like characters from The Simsbut they are real people.