[MUD-Dev] Online worlds and behavior...

[etykwins at fcbayern.de]

I'm sorry but I lost the original title in the digest.

Ola wrote:

>>> There is no reason to believe that humans in online worlds are
>>> significantly different than humans in the physical world. Is
>>> there?

>> On the contrary. It is well known that people on the net tend to
>> be less constrained by the regular rules of conduct since they
>> cannot be held accountable because of the nature of the
>> medium. This tends to lead toward more aggressive behaviour, at
>> least in my experience.

> You have disinhibition in the real world as well, for instance
> when wearing a uniform, going to a place where nobody knows you
> etc.

Well I guess first I should give a little bit about my background,
I'm a Network Admin that has a degree in Industrial/Organizational
psychology, currently working on a MS degree in Human-computer
interactions.  In many cases you both are right, through various
experiments that I have seen on computer questionaires versus
written questionaires.  The general gist of the studies that I have
read state that outcomes are similar in both situations, however
computer questionaires tend to give more information.  The actual
cause of this is still under debate however.  Many researchers state
that it is due to anonimity, however on opinion based subject matter
finding causality is hard to accomplish because true answers are
relative to the subject in question.  So all in all there is just a
simple correlation between computer based answers and the prevalence
of people answering more.

Here's a link to one such experiment:

  http://lap.umd.edu/lap/Papers/Tech_Reports/LAP1994TR02/shn.html

And if you really feel like digging deep into the matter I'd suggest
check out:

  http://www.siop.org/

Ciao,
Eric
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