CRCS Seminar 10/24 Mahzarin Banaji скачать в хорошем качестве

CRCS Seminar 10/24 Mahzarin Banaji

Since the 1950’s, social psychologists have been attempting to create a “virtual reality” in the laboratory to understand complex social behavior. For example, Stanley Milgram, interested in what led to the pervasive obedience to authority in Nazi Germany, created a laboratory analog by asking individual subjects to obey an authority figure who asked the subject to harm another human being. The result was shocking because it revealed that a large percentage of people, like ourselves, will indeed obey a mild authority figure and do things we ourselves would consider abhorrent. Such experiments can no longer be conducted because of the serious ethical issues involved in deceiving subjects in the laboratory. Today, social psychology has turned to understanding mental processes using a variety of harmless tasks that can teach us a great deal without posing the ethical challenges of the earlier work. Our own work, using the Implicit Association Test is an example, with complete transparency about what the experience for the subject will be. However, many real problems in the social world cannot be studied in the lab if we rely on these innocuous procedures. The question we face is this: can we use technology to neither deceive participants nor give up creating what we call “mundane realism” – the feeling that the lab experience is (close to) what a person might experience in the real world. This is where VR enters the conversation. I would like to discuss what the early studies have shown. The hope is that those in attendance will help us realize its full potential (given our lack of knowledge of VR itself) and more importantly, to decide if there’s interest in collaborating on experiments on what we might call “Social Cognition in VR.” These experiments would study how we view others who are similar or different from us (along lines of gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, nationality, social class, etc.). These experiments would also attempt to shift one’s sense of self in VR to be somebody who is other than the natural self. The extent to which social categories we belong to are flexible and changeable is an important question. Facebook acquired Occulus and there is interest on their part in collaboration if Harvard has the appropriate team, which in my mind would require psychologists and computer scientists.