body-language
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Body language in World of Warcraft
I recently wrote an article which lightly tickled the social science surrounding nerd rage on WoW, and the internet as a whole, and as is ever the case, I read the comments thoroughly. It often happens that, with more analytical articles such as those, the comments spur a whole new article, and that is exactly what happened here. DiegoAlvarenga :There is also the lack of body language that is like 97% of our comunication. Diego makes an excellent point. A huge part of human communication that is lacking from online gaming is the body language, the facial expression, the smiling eyes that tell you something is a joke, all those things. Emoticons can go some distance towards remedying this, but it only extends so far. While not all internet rage is caused by mis-comprehension, some will be. But I was inspired to address something else entirely, and it's a concept that's slightly tricky to explain, so bear with me. We're diving deeper into the social psychology here! First we have to allow that our avatars, our characters, our toons, count as "bodies" in some respect. Now, of course, they aren't living, breathing entities, they don't feel pain, they don't have a heartbeat, they don't exist outside of the game-world. That much is obvious. But we inject life into them. We put a little of ourselves into them, even if we view them as puppets that travel through the world on our behalf, rather than a representation of us. You're not convinced? Let me try to persuade you.
Nexi robot helps Northeastern University track effects of shifty body language (video)
MIT's Nexi robot has been teaching us about social interaction for years, and has even done a stint with the US Navy. Its latest role, however, involved studying those moments when society falls apart. Northeastern University researchers made Nexi the key ingredient of an experiment where subjects were asked to play a Prisoner's Dilemma-style game immediately after a conversation, whether it was with a human or a machine. Nexi showed that humans are better judges of trustworthiness after they see the telltale body language of dishonesty -- crossed arms, leaning back and other cues -- even when those expressions come from a collection of metal and plastic. The study suggests not just that humans are tuned to watch for subtle hints of sketchy behavior, but that future humanoid robots could foster trust by using the right gestures. We'll look forward to the friendlier machine assistants that result... and keep in mind the room for deception when the robots invariably plot to take over the world.
