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VR Study Says 40% of Us Are Paranoid

Posted by Zonk on from the other-sixty-percent-are-out-to-get-us dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "UK researchers have recently used virtual reality to check if people had paranoid thoughts when using public transportation. Their VR tube ride experiment revealed that 40% of the participants experienced exaggerated fears about threats from others. Until now, researchers were relying on somewhat unreliable questionnaires to study paranoid thoughts which are often triggered by ambiguous events such as someone laughing behind their back. With the use of VR, psychiatrists and psychologists have a new tool which can reliably recreate social interactions. As the lead researcher said, VR 'is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people.'."

3 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Uncanny valley? by bargainsale · · Score: 4, Informative

    A lifelike VR simulation is likely to be more creepy than reality because of the "Uncanny valley" effect

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

    --
    Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
  2. Err... Uncanny Valley effect? by JavaRob · · Score: 4, Informative
    I RTFA... can we just mod down this entire story?
    It's a *virtual reality* subway ride. The other passengers are AI.

    The carriage contained neutral computer people (avatars) that breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants. One avatar read a newspaper, another would occasionally smile if looked at. A soundtrack of a train carriage was played. Even if none of these participants have *ever* played a video game (which would obviously tend to prime them for something nasty coming up), this sounds creepy just from the description.

    People who will feel perfectly normal taking a subway ride with human beings who occasionally meet your gaze or smile, or even talk to themselves.. will be royally spooked if you replace those human passengers with Uncanny Valley inhabitants: not human enough to fool you, but human enough to seem like an animated corpse.

    The article completely ignores this effect. It could be useful research -- one can find out useful information about people with the ability to put different people in identical situations -- but it's absolute nonsense to say "wow, 40% of people have paranoid thoughts on a simple subway ride". Go figure, but virtual reality and reality are not, in fact, the same.
  3. april fools... by sluggie · · Score: 2, Informative

    i mean come on, dr. freeman on a subway...