It appears that members of the psychological profession are desperate to provide research whether it matters or not. They no longer limit themselves to saying bizarre things about people's behavior in the real world. Now they're equating things that happen in the virtual world to reality. That's right folks, we are now having our behavior judged by avatars.
I submit to you a study done at the University of Oxford. Utilizing a virtual world, they determined that a person's height made other people feel more inferior and mistrustful. Sometimes I think there are psychologists who need therapy to determine why they are psychologists.
Should I be able to discuss this study with Prof. Daniel Freeman, who conducted this work classified as an experiment, I would yell “It's the virtual world. If you don't like your height you can simply make yourself taller because it's a virtual world. In the realm of reality, things are a bit different.”
It appears to me that a group of professors at Oxford simply devised a way to play video games and get paid for it. They did this behind the illusion of research.
Below are excerpts from the study in bold and my valuable insights in italics.
In the new study, researchers used a "virtual reality simulation" to test the emotional responses of 60 adult women who "were prone to having mistrustful thoughts."
If these women lived in some high crime areas having mistrustful thoughts may be a good thing. What does “prone” to having mistrustful thoughts mean? How is this determined? Were the experiment participants chosen from a female group in Oxford called “the Organization of Women Prone to Having Mistrustful Thoughts?”
"Being tall is associated with greater career and relationship success. Height is taken to convey authority, and we feel taller when we feel more powerful. It is little wonder then that men and women tend to over-report their height. In this study, we reduced people's height, which led to a striking consequence: people felt inferior and this caused them to feel overly mistrustful."
Reduced people's height? (Sarcasm Alert) Yeah, because that happens all the time in the real world. If people are too tall they could be forced to walk on their knees to not make other people feel inferior. Geeeeze!
Most of the participants in the study did not realize that their height had been lowered on the second pass of the simulation. But there was a significant increase in the number of people reporting negative feelings while experiencing the second journey. These included feeling incompetent, unlikeable and inferior - and there was also an increase in feelings of paranoia toward the other "passengers" of the train.
If you experience these feeling from participating in a virtual simulation you could have real problems. Someone needs to take all 60 of these participants and scream “It's a virtual world. If it bothers you just turn it off. You have that power. Stop playing it. It doesn't really exist. If you are feeling paranoid, incompetent, unlikeable and inferior from a video simulation, you could have an IQ with a decimal point in the front.”
“It provides a key insight into paranoia," says Prof. Freeman, "showing that people's excessive mistrust of others directly builds upon their own negative feelings about themselves. The important treatment implication for severe paranoia that we can take from this study is that if we help people to feel more self-confident then they will be less mistrustful. This prediction is exactly what we are testing in the next phase of our work, a new randomized controlled clinical trial."
Huh? What? “if we help people to feel more self-confident then they will be less mistrustful” I guess this would be possible in a virtual world that only exists on a computer. In the cyber world, you could make all people orange with green stripes covered with red hair and sing every time they speak. In the realm of reality where I live, this study doesn't have too much value. How do we help people to feel more self-confident? Maybe we tell them to avoid participating in studies that take place in the cyber world.
STUDY
Paranoia increases when experiencing situations from a lower height
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