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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.'."
Maube I am being paranoid here, but 40%????
That would explain a lot of the stupidity going on with terrorism and other tools uses to manipulate the public.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm sure these statistics are going to be used against us by the government to push some new laws to will limit our freedom.
Paraonia is an opinion. If someone's laughing right behind you, it's 100% normal to wonder if it's about you. That's basic social interaction and everyone who's paying enough attention SHOULD be concerned. If you completely ignore it or assume it's not about you, you're a sociopath. The morons that ran these experiments probably started with the basis that nobody should be worried about anything ever unless they're being attacked by a tiger or something. Apparently they forgot that if I take one step towards a bird without even looking at it or intending to eat it, it flies away. It's not paranoia, it's normal.
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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
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This is Britain they're talking about. If you live in Britain today and you're not paranoid, you're crazy.
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.
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REALLY have the world against them.
It seems to me that it would be impossible to extrapolate this VR study to real life. I mean, you strap on virtual reality goggles, and are presented with a scene from riding the tube (subway). It's like a video game, so of course you think the characters in it are about to pull out an AK47 and start shooting at you. Plus you are doing it as part of some experiment. What are you told before you strap on the goggles?
But in a an actual ride on the tube, you would be thinking about something else -- you wouldn't be watching all the people, trying to figure out what is going on, as you would during some VR lab test...
Deconstruct the State
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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.
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.
The more repressive and invasive a government or other powerful entity gets, the more paranoid people become.
I don't get cautious around most white people. Being a US academic I'm surrounded by them. They are my friends and colleagues. However, in every city I've lived in except Los Angeles, I have had whites yell "nigger" at me as they drive by in cars. In three places spanning a dozen years, drunken young white male students have challenged me to fight (tried to provoke an excuse to beat me); so far, I open my mouth, they see I'm intelligent, and they go away.
These white men look like any thousands of white men I've seen all my life. Appearances count, in my case, for absolutely nothing.
I wonder, how may times have you been accosted by a black, gangbanger lookalike or otherwise?
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The study mentions "exaggerated fears" of the threats from others. Sure, it pays to be a bit overly-cautious with strangers on public transportation. That doesn't translate into "extreme, irrational, psychotic, they're-all-out-to-get-me" paranoia... I think "mistrust" is a far more accurate term.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
But in a an actual ride on the tube, you would be thinking about something else
Perhaps velociraptors? In that case at least there are some solutions.
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That's funny. I was thinking if xkcd came up here, it would be referencing this one.