Virtual reenactment of the Milgram Obedience Experiments
A thought-provoking experiment has demonstrated not only that cyberspace can be used to overcome ethical constraints in experiments but also how some of us are reluctant at the idea of torturing a virtual character.
Stanley Milgram‘s 1960s experimental findings that people would administer apparently lethal electric shocks to a stranger at the behest of an authority figure remain critical for understanding obedience. Due to ethical reasons, it is nowadays impossible to carry out direct experimental studies in this area.
Mel Slater and his colleagues at University College London have used VR to reenact the Milgram’s experiment. Their objective was to uncover the extent to which participants would respond to the situation as if it were real in spite of their knowledge that no real events were taking place.
Participants were invited to administer memory tests to an avatar. When she gave an incorrect answer, the participants were instructed to administer an ‘electric shock’ to her, augmenting the voltage each time. She responded with increasing discomfort and protests. Of the 34 participants, 23 saw and heard the virtual human, and 11 communicated with her only through a text interface.
The participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real. Six of them chose to stop the experiment before it was due to end. A further 6 said it had occurred to them to stop early because they had negative feelings about what was happening. By contrast, of the eleven participants who only interacted with the (unseen) woman by text, just one stopped the experiment early, and no others said it had occurred to them to stop.
Participants who could see and hear the avatar were affected by the experiment as if it were real. Their stress responses were raised (as judged by sweating and heart rate). And when the woman protested, the participants tended to give her longer to answer before administering the shock. Some participants emphasised the correct answer among the available choices, as if trying to help the woman avoid a shock.
As Yishay Mor notes, the results put in a new light the idea that we should give human rights to sentient machines.
Image on the right from the movie I comme Icare
Videos related to Milgram experiment. Videos of the Virtual re-enactment of the obedience experiment.
Paper in PLoS ONE.
BoingBoing also points to another Milgram Reenactment, this time by Eric Paulos.
Originally
from we make money not art
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Jan 5, 2007, 8:21AM
Innovators and the university (the b-school)
If the University is no longer so vital as a center of innovation (see yesterday’s post), does it still create innovators?
Call
this the "Canada" model of innovation where an institution/country that
is bad at innovation still manages to export people who are good at it.
The
University is, of course, a house of many mansions. I will look only
at the professional schools: the b-school, d-school, e-school, and the
law school. (Though I will say in passing that the liberal arts
continue to supply exemplary intellectual training even as they too
often insists on political and epistemological orthodoxy that renders
the liberal arts grad next to useless when it comes to innovation. And
here I define innovation as IBM’s Sanford does: creativity plus
insight.)
B-Schools
B-schools are good at some aspects of
innovation training, and really bad at others. That "easter egg hunt"
called the case study is very good at giving students the ability to
see through a confusing tangle of factors to the things that matter.
But this is a decompositional ability. It is good at breaking down,
and much less good at building up.
If the culture of
Microsoft has a problem when it comes to innovation, it is precisely
this. Not so long ago, I listened to Microsoft managers interrogate
potential innovations, demanding to know how they could be monetized!
Most innovations begin as inspirations and we should treat them as the
Inuit treat newly born children, as gifts who must be treated with solicitude for fear they will return whence they came. Spare inspirations
the ROI rack…at least for a little while.
This is a long
standing problem for the corporation and the b-school. Both are so
keen on a tough minded pragmatism that there are often insufficient
intellectual resources or inclinations with which too nourish or
embrace the new. After all, the new begins as something barely
thinkable. It is too much to ask that it make itself immediately
practical. Both the b-school and the corporation have to get better at ideas that are almost completely weightless and quite
without utility.
The further problem with the business school
is that it continues to treat the consumer and producer as economic actors and the
market place as the sum and total of the transactions creating between
these actors. All the larger, collective contexts that
establish value, create context, supply meaning and motivate purchase
are dismissed or diminished. Culture never gets talked about in a systematic way.
When
I was teaching at a business school we taught a cases on DeWalt power
tools and Land’s End merchandising, both of which turn on the cultural
specifications of gender. (Briefly DeWalt repositioned a brand
by regendering it. Land’s End was gifted a new segment of female consumers because
cultural ideas of women and women’s clothing were changing.) These cultural
specifications were never mentioned. When I raised them as
possibilities people looked at me as if I were mad. (I hasten to add
that I am not one of those social scientist who wants to neglect or
exclude "economic man." The challenge for anthropology is indeed
how to make him feel as welcome as an Inuit child.)
B-schools were
founded and largely staffed by economists. Over the years, the
economists were displaced and a supra-economistic understanding of the
consumer, the producer and the marketplace were smuggled in. The work
of this transformation is however not complete, despite the fact that
the intellectual work has been in place for some time: Durkheim,
Polanyi, Sahlins, Granovetter. Let the revolution continue.
In
sum, the innovators produced by b-schools are hampered in two ways.
First, the b-school discourages the the full creativity that innovation
requires. Second, it artificially constrains the problem set, so that
students are discourages from combining creativity with insight, that
is, with a full reckoning of the world in which the creativity
must make itself useful. (I refer once more to Linda Sanford’s distinction.)
I have run out of time but by this first reckoning it looks as if the
University might be failing in the production of both innovation and
innovators. This is scarier, still.
Tomorrow: the d-schools and innovation
Reference
Sanford, Linda. 2006. Building an Innovation Company for the 21st
Century. MIT-IBM Innovation Lecture Series. October 17, 2006. here.
Originally
from This Blog Sits at the
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 27, 2006, 7:51PM
Senspectra
Another project from the very clever fellows at MITs Tangible Media group. Senspectra is a computationally augmented physical modeling toolkit designed for sensing and visualization of structural strain. The system functions as a distributed sensor network consisting of nodes, embedded with computational capabilities and a full spectrum LED, which communicate to neighbor nodes to determine a network topology through a system of flexible joints. While the Senspectra infrastructure provides a flexible modular sensor network platform, its primary application derives from the need to couple physical modeling techniques utilized in the architecture and industrial design disciplines with systems for structural engineering analysis, offering an intuitive approach for physical real-time finite element analysis. Utilizing direct manipulation augmented with visual feedback, the system gives users valuable insights on the global behavior of a constructed system defined as a network of discrete elements.
Originally
from Interactive Architecture dot Org
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 5, 2006, 11:27PM
Ethnographic research on teens and brands
 |
Starcom MediaVest Group (a subsidiary of the Publicis Group) and CNET Networks, Inc. revealed the results of an ethnographic study on teens and brands.
The extensive ethnographic youth study was aimed at “helping marketers understand how to reach today’s elusive population of 13- to 34-year-olds, responsible for $600 billion each year in consumer spending”. The study set out to assess “how young people feel about brands, how they talk about them with friends, and how they take in, manipulate, and redistribute marketing messages”. In addition, the study identifies ‘brand sirens’, i.e. “the super-influencers of the youth market, including who they are, what they do, and how marketers can better reach them”. Not surprisingly (in light of the sponsors), the study shows that “today’s young people care about the brands they use, talk often with their friends about brands, and like watching real-time television”. - Read press release |
Originally
from Putting people first
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Sep 26, 2006, 6:03AM
