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VR Study Says 40% of Us Are Paranoid
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.'."
First of all, what pretense was given to the test subjects for the experiment? Obviously you can't tell them "we're going to see if you're paranoid", so what did they tell them? The very act of being in an experiment where you're put in a VR environment is likely to affect behavour and the way you interpret people.
Secondly, put this in context of the location used for the experiment. A VR reproduction of the London underground? A place where you're crowded by people, a place which in all honesty does have a reputation for being a haven for pickpockets (whether that's deserved or not I don't know), and oh yes, one other thing - the site of the last major (successful) terrorist attack on Britain. Gee, do you think any of this might make people a little more wary when put into that environment for an experiment?
Some of this is addressed in TFA of course, but it doesn't correspond to the sensational headlines this peice has been getting in tabloids and on the Internet. Being somewhat cautious in that particular situation is a world away from the headlines implicating that 40% of us are clinically paranoid all the time.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I don't get cautious around most black people, but you better believe I get cautious around ones that look like they've bought into the thug culture. Is that paranoid? How do I know that they aren't in fact some wannabe gangbanger? Saying "don't judge a book by its cover" toward people is irrational. Appearances are one of the most effective ways to gauge what sort of person you are dealing with.
Having just recently been the victim of an attempted bashing (still got bruises), I can understand how events like that put you on edge. Mine was pretty random - I was walking through a park, heard "fucking faggot!" yelled behind me, and turned around just in time to cop a fist to the face. It was mildly ironic, since I was walking with a young lady I'd picked up that night, who yelled and screamed until he went away while I was figuring out how to stand up again, but he obviously knew how to throw a punch, which I sure as hell don't, he didn't care that I was a complete stranger, and I shudder to think how I would have ended up if I'd been on my own.
I'm curious, if sounding intelligent doesn't get you out of one of these situations, what other options do you have at your disposal? Do you or would you consider carrying a firearm? Have you done any martial arts or self-defence training?
A counterpoint to your question, though: The first site I could find that didn't look like a hatespeech outlet still suggests that black-on-white gang violence, US-wide, is approximately 8 times more prevalent than white-on black, in a country with 6 times as many whites as blacks. If you have any other numbers I'd like to see them.
I'm not excusing anyone's behaviour here, and I admire your restraint in dealing with the fuckwits you've encountered thus far. There are obviously heavy social, cultural, historic, economic and legal factors in the equation, and the above is just one type of crime out of many. I assume there are also rampant reporting discrepancies - yelling "nigger" at someone is a crime pretty much anywhere with hatespeech laws, but I doubt it gets reported or enforced frequently, if ever.
Your thoughts?