The Proteus Effect

What effect does a virtual reality avatar have on the user? Can it alter your identity? Can it change how you behave in the real world? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the Proteus Effect, named for the shape-shifting, formless Greek sea god.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be touching on a
topic related to virtual characters. That's right. This was a

(00:24):
topic that was suggested to us by our listener Peter,
who is quite involved in virtual reality these days, and
he said, hey, you guys should do an episode on
the proteus effect. Now, the proteus effect is something that
will deal with virtual characters. So we're gonna be touching
on video games and virtual environments and stuff like that.
But even if you're somebody who has no personal interests

(00:46):
in video games or anything like that, I hope you
stick around because it's an interesting topic nonetheless, and I
think it will ultimately have some relevance to yourself in
the society you live in, even if you're not somebody
who's ever played games or plans on playing games, because
a lot of it does just hinge upon the idea
of what happens when we put on this other face,

(01:07):
and it could be you can you can take it
to the virtual reality extremes to where there is a
body that I am occupying and I'm walking around in
it within a virtual environment. There's the video game level
of a character that I have. I have picked out
its face, I have picked out it's it's clothing options,
and now I am interacting with a digital world through it.

(01:28):
But you can also take it down to the avatar
level on various message boards or email threads, etcetera. Yeah, totally. Now,
if you're not familiar with how some of these video
games work, where you create an avatar for yourself, this
this is a thing that happens in a lot of games.
There's a character creation process. Not all games. Some games

(01:49):
the character I mean some games you don't actually even
play as a character. You don't embody a person shaped thing.
They're like puzzle games and stuff. But in games where
you play as a character of some hype, some of
them it's just a fictional, pre established character. But sometimes
you get to create that character yourself, right, and there's
usually the beginning of the game some type of process

(02:09):
you go through to do that, and you get to
like pick what they look like, and maybe pick what
some of their personality attributes are or what some of
their skills are a lot of games have a thing
like this. Robert, do you have a favorite favorite character
creation Yeah, well, I'd say more the more recent games.
I've really enjoyed the like the sky Rim and Fallout
character creation suites. I feel like you have a lot

(02:31):
of a lot of options there and you can kind
of create exactly the character you want. Uh. Thinking back
to the older games, I was a big fan of
ice wind Dale and ice wind Dale too. I have
no idea what that is. These were turn based dungeons
and Dragons, uh, role playing games that you would play

(02:52):
online like top down View and that they so it
was virtual. It was not like a pin and paper,
not pin and paper. These were video games. They were
the same engine as Balter's Gay and Torment was another
one though Torment had pre created characters but was still
a fabulous game. But the creation suite, especially on on
ice wind Dale too, as I remember, they had some

(03:13):
really cool character art you could you could select for
the thumbnail. I believe that through some minor tinkering you
could bring in outside art to serve as the thumbnail
and then you had a fair that these were not
the most detailed of characters on the screen, but you
had a fair amount of choice and how they were
put together as well. Yeah, So one of the things

(03:34):
we're going to be exploring today is what are the
effects of coming to embody a character in a virtual environment?
Does that change the player when you play as a
character with certain physical or behavioral attributes? Now, Robert, my
the main character creation process in video games I remember

(03:57):
from when I was younger is not as interesting as yours.
It was the wrestler creation mode in the Nintendo sixty
four game WWF war Zone, which I played when I
was in like six seventh grade, I think this game, yeah,
and so it was this terrible, blocky looking wrestling game,
uh that had the WWF wrestlers in it, but you

(04:17):
could create a custom wrestler. And so what my friends
and I would always do is try to figure out
how to create the most ridiculous looking wrestler you possibly
could that had like I don't know, like you know,
legs that were five times wider than his head and
wearing some crazy Easter egg costume. And it was it
was mainly for laughs, but we did put a lot

(04:39):
of time and energy into it. It was like we
had to achieve peak ridiculousness. Well, the ultimate tragedy is
that you were just a few years away from w
w F WrestleMania two thousand and No Mercy, which were
both in sixty four wrestling games built on the the
a Ki Virtual Pro Wrestling engine from Japan. I don't
know what that is. They were fabulous games, just a

(05:00):
fabulous engine for the game. But you know, they these
wrestling games have come a long ways. I was never
into creating myself in them because it just felt weird
to me, but I knew people that would do it,
And nowadays you can. You can like bring in scans
of your own face or the scans of virtually any

(05:21):
existing wrestler or celebrity and create an amazingly life like
just an immaculate representation of that individual in these updated
wrestling games. So you scan yourself in and you make
a virtual copy of yourself and then watch it get
beat down by stone Cold exactly. However, Yeah, go through

(05:41):
a table or bleed through its face, and it's, uh,
the technology is amazing, and yet at the same point,
it's it's it's it's even stranger to me to try
and imagine myself doing that, like creating a like a
muscled avatar of myself that just goes in there and
just gets beat to a luddy pulp. Now, on one hand,
you could look at that and say, Okay, that's you know,

(06:04):
it's just people horsing around having fun play in some games,
which is generally true, and if you take that attitude,
you're probably not gonna, you know, think that there's anything
super meaningful going on here. But on the other hand,
it's really worth wondering how doing something like that could
affect you and possibly change you. This is not a

(06:25):
scenario that we are biologically adapted for in any way.
I would say that there's no analogy in nature to
creating a virtual environment in which you take on the
characteristics of a created character and play within that virtual environment.
I mean, I guess you could say that they're like

(06:46):
rituals maybe where people sort of embody mythological characters that
they play within the rituals, Right, But even then you're
still bound to your body when you're doing that enactment. Yeah,
I mean, the only other example I can think of
is just uh, the mental mental time travel, chromasthesia and
imagining various scenarios occurring and extrapolating how you might react

(07:09):
in those situations. But then you're still pretty much bound
to yourself unless there's a particular example from uh, you know,
from from from cultural history where someone is embodying in
this process, they are embodying the aspect of a god,
but I am not aware of it. If there is, well, yeah,
I would say the imagination that's pretty much the only

(07:31):
equivalent space. But the imagination is not physically enacted. When
you do virtual environments, you have to physically perform movements
within those virtual environments. You have to like, you know,
you move a controller or something like that. It's a
it's a challenging process that you have to engage with,
and that is more continuous than imagination, which tends to

(07:53):
kind of come in and out. Right. Yeah, the the
just merely imagining something or reading a book is probably
not gonna update your body schema, which into the way
that you're thinking about your own body. Right, So you
have to wonder does the idea of playing as a
character different than yourself change yourself? Does going into a

(08:14):
virtual environment and embodying some other type of being make
you a different kind of being in reality? And that's
what we're gonna be looking at today, So let's take
a moment to talk about just the name of of
the effect here, the Proteus effect. So who was Proteus, Well,
it would see he was a character in the matrix,

(08:35):
right was he was there? A Proteus matrix. So it's
been a while since I've entered the matrix. Uh, well,
you know, the funny thing is, it would seem that
that fate would have us return once more to the
world of undersea gods and humanoids, because because what we
have here is Proteus from Greek mythology, the old Man
of the Sea, the Old Man of the Sea. Yeah,

(08:58):
essentially a primordial sea god. As with all things mythological,
Proteus is exact identity, and his role shifts over time.
But that's quite fitting for Proteus in a number of ways.
In Giants, Monsters and Dragons by Carol Rose, an encyclopedia
of fantastic Entities and Creatures that I come back to
again and again, she describes him as quote a primordial

(09:21):
sea giant and quote a type of gigantic merman and
guardian of the sea creatures. And he served Poseidon, the
sea god. He boasted the gift of prophecy as well,
but you had to catch him to get him to
share his prophecies. Wait, how do you catch him? Is
that like rod and lure kind of catching Or essentially
it's like you gotta chase him down and fight him,

(09:42):
wrestle him, overcome him that way. But the problem is
that Proteus can change his shape. He can change it
into something more monstrous to escape you, uh, you know,
swifter to escape do you escape you with etcetera. Uh.
The secret, though, ends up being revealed by his daughter Elda,
the uh who who lets a few select mortals know

(10:03):
that you have to catch him while he's sleeping on
the island of Pharaohs. Now. Various other accounts describe him
as not only a shape changer, but a being that
is just constantly changing shape, as being essentially formless, which
is fitting because this is a is a god of
the sea. This makes him like the sea itself. He
is liquid, He is ever changing, difficult to predict, kind

(10:25):
of like those identity masks in a scanner. Darkly. Yeah,
it's sort of like never really taking a solid form,
so you can't really identify somebody later. Yeah, or and
and would make him difficult to catch as well. And
this is where we get the word protean, which means
tending or able to change frequently or easily. Uh. Sometimes
it's used just to just in the place of versatile.

(10:49):
But I think that's sort of usage is kind of
an insult to the gods, because you might say that, say,
Sammy Hagar is versatile and that he can front a
band and run a tequila brand. But I think it's
a bit much to say that that Sammy Hagar, it's protean.
Though that's impressive. I can do neither of those things. No,
I I see what you're saying. Like a protean suggests

(11:11):
some more fundamental changes and and commitments to different natures, right,
whereas versatile just says that you can, you can multitask,
you can do some different stuff. Yeah, protean almost has it.
I mean it has a sort of mad or holy
vibe to it, right, Like something that is protean is
um is difficult for us to master and grasp, And

(11:34):
maybe the same is true of Sammy Hagar. I'm not sure.
Certainly it's hard to get him to commit to a
speed limit. We know that much. Robert where at all
the Sammy Hagar come from. I don't know. You just
listen to the Classic rock radio the other day and
I was just trying to think about who's who is
an individual that's considered versatile in their interests, and I
Sammy Hagar, Well, I know I have. I initially thought

(11:56):
of of Maynard from Tool, but then I thought, well,
I don't know, maybe Maynard is protean. I'm not sure
he's a he's a he's he's a mysterious dude that's
called Sammy Hagar instead. So it's a clear cut you're
saying Maynard from Tool he does he does his alternative
hard rock thing, and he does his I've got a
vineyard I make wine thing yeah and m m a

(12:18):
oh yeah he's into fighting. Yeah yeah, he has has
multiple dimensions to his character. The idea it all comes
back to wrestling in the end. Yeah, maybe not all
that protean, but that's certainly versatile. But today we're not
talking about Sammy Hagar. We're not talking about Maynard, We're
not even really talking about Greek shape shifters. We're talking
about the Internet, video games, virtual reality, and the idea

(12:42):
that we get to pick and choose our form, and
in doing so, maybe we have to choose our identity.
All right, well, we will take a quick break. When
we come back, we will get into the original research
on the proteus effect. Thank alright, we're back, all right now.
The short definition of the proteus effect is that it
is a name for the way that avatars, meaning virtual

(13:05):
characters that we embody. It's a name for the way
that avatars change our behavior in a virtual environment. So
there was some original research on this subject between the
years like two thousand seven and two thousand nine or so.
That's when this first came out, and it was associated
with the work of a researcher by the name of
Nicki Ye and Nikki he was. He was the scientist

(13:28):
behind the original proteus effect, and he summarized his original
research in an article I read from two thousand and
nine where he pointed out some of the main features
that they had discovered in their first couple of studies
on it. So he points out, to start with, this
was sort of like the starting basis of the idea
that putting on certain garments, clothing and uniforms has been

(13:51):
shown to change people's behavior. For example, there are these
experiments that show that when you dress subjects in black uniforms,
they behave more aggressively than when you dress them in
white uniforms. And experiments like these show that to some extent,
our behavior is influenced by visual self perception. We act

(14:11):
out the parts people would expect us to act out
based on how we look. And I think this is
probably the same kind of research that informs, or at
least partially informs the old business idea that you should
dress for the job you want, not the job you
have rights right now, I think the part of that
advice is based on the reasoning the dressing that way

(14:31):
will influence the people who have the power to hire
or promote you. Right that you want to look the part,
and so you're trying to influence others. But there's another
side of that that dressing for the job you want
is also an influence on the self. It can also
be a beneficial alteration of self perception. If you dress
like someone with a certain job, you'll probably find yourself

(14:52):
behaving and performing more like someone who belongs in that job.
You put the costume on, and the costume helps you
get into character. But what this research shows with the
way in clothes cognition changes us is that the costume
tends to get you into character, whether you mean to
get into character or not. Now we've touched on in

(15:14):
clothes cognition on the show in the past, cognitive psychologist
Joe Adam and Adam Galinsky from Northwestern University coined the term.
One of the most famous examples is the use of,
say a lab coat. What happens when you wear a
lab coat and maybe carry a clipboard around. Well, they
found that the effect would work. You would feel like

(15:35):
smarter or more, you know, in control of your doctor's
status here, But only if you wore the coat and
we're aware of the symbolic meaning. So you actually you
have to know what it's about, what it represents, and
you actually have to essentially make it a part of
your body by covering yourself in it. Yeah, I would
say that essentially the way this works is that you're
performing according to stereotypes, but you have to be aware

(15:59):
of the stereo peotypes to perform according to them, right, right,
And then, according to Golinski as well, we don't just
think with our brains, but with our bodies and our
thought processes are based on physical quote physical experiences that
set off associated abstract concepts. Yeah, I think. I mean
this might sound kind of silly, but I think about

(16:20):
the way that wearing a suit jacket changes the way
I behave I think sometimes it does, and I very
much associated literally with the way my shoulders and my
arms feel. Well I put on a suit jacket, I
feel the tension in the way the jacket constrains the
movements of my shoulders or not not necessarily constrains them,

(16:44):
but you know, you feel you can feel the jacket
that's shaped like that, the suit jacket, and it actually
does influence I think, probably the way I talk, probably
to some extent, the way I react to people, whether
I'm more likely to shake somebody's hand. I mean, obviously
there's no way to fully test this in a controlled way,
but I strongly suspect that it changes my behavior, and

(17:05):
it changes my behavior through a constant, attenuated awareness of
what my body feels like in that piece of clothing.
So you're not you're not only dressing like business Joe,
you become business Joe. You know, Business Joe's different than
a lot of other business shows because the suit jackets
I wear are are not like cool business jackets. They're
more like old seventies jackets I got from my dad. Now,

(17:27):
I think we do need to be careful with this
kind of research because I think it's very easy to
interpret it in an overly determinative way. For example, I
was I was wondering, Okay, are there studies that have
found the opposite, that have found that this whole you know,
like wearing a black uniform doesn't actually change the way
you behave compared to wearing some other colored uniform. And yeah,

(17:49):
there there are studies going the opposite way, not necessarily
that undercut the original findings, but at least that showed
that the effect is obviously not the same in all contexts.
For example, the search has been applied to uniform colors
in professional sports, and I found a two thousand ten
study that found no correlation at all between uniform color
and aggression in professional hockey. This is the basic argument

(18:13):
was that like if you wore red, right, if you
wear like a red uniform or a black uniform or something,
that you're going to be more aggressive than if you
wear like a blue uniform or green uniform. And this
study found no correlation of that kind, said it didn't
matter what color uniforms the hockey players were wearing. But
like I said, it doesn't mean the original research is wrong,
just that it probably applies differently in different contexts and

(18:37):
depends on a lot of different variables. So, but back
to what was Ye's research to establish the idea of
the proteus effect. So, in a serious experiment, starting with
one published in two thousand seven, Ye and colleagues tried
to study whether the same perception embodiment, whether the same
like embodiment of what others see you looking like that

(18:57):
takes place with clothes and costumes also takes place with
virtual costumes, meaning virtual characters. Does the virtual avatar that
you choose to represent you in a video game or
a virtual world change who you are and how you
behave Now this question instantly makes me think back to

(19:18):
screens that I've seen a second life. I have not,
I've never really used second life myself, but they never
really Does that mean you have a little bit? Well,
what I did is that I attended a church service
where the the individual giving the sermon also did the
sermon in second life, and there were individuals gathered from,

(19:40):
you know, across the country, and I guess beyond in
a virtual if that's the right word for a second
life environment, a virtual chapel uh to share in the sermon.
And they were attending in various forms. So some people
were women, some people were male, some people were like
animals or animal human hybrids. So that is I instantly

(20:01):
thought to that and thought, well, you know, I wonder
what was going on in each of their minds, Like
what did their chosen forms say about their ideal identity,
their experienced identity, etcetera. I've never considered this question before,
but what generally would the theologians of the various religions
say about whether the rituals and sacraments of their religion

(20:24):
are effective if performed virtually. So like, if you, for example,
receive holy communion in a Christian church, or do a
ritual in any religion, but do it not physically with
your body, but virtually in a virtual environment, does the
sacrament work? Does it confer the same benefit? Huh? Well,
that's a great question. I don't recall. I don't think

(20:44):
this particular service involved communion, but maybe it did, and
I just forgot about it. I imagine that, though, of course,
would hinge upon your faith, you know, particular beliefs about communion.
Uh for instance, so whether the bread actually becomes the
body of Christ in your body, that sort of thing.
But then again, if if you believe that, then why

(21:06):
can't the the digital communion wafer do the same thing? Somehow?
I don't know. Well, it takes me back to the
techno religion question we are. I don't know if we
ever got into this question in our techno religion episodes,
but we did talk about the idea of whether a
virtual similar simulated prayer wheel is just as effective as
a physical prayer wheel. That's right, Uh yeah, because of course,

(21:27):
the the the traditional prayer wheels are essentially a machine
praised in what tradition? Is it Buddhist or Buddhist? Yes?
Uh so, it's it's a wheel that contains h the
prayer as it's usually like written down on sheet of
paper and or not a sheet of paper, but it's
a long string of paper coiled up in there, and

(21:47):
by by turning it, you are turning the prayer. Uh.
But how is that really that different from a digital
machine doing the same thing. It's just a it's an
advancement in the technology, but but it doesn't seem like
it's an advancement in the basic idea. Well, I find
that a very interesting question, and maybe we can come
back to it in the future. But we are getting
off subject. Okay, So we're looking at the first study

(22:10):
by Ye and colleagues, and this was in two thousand
seven and human Communication research, And what the researchers did
in the study is compare subjects with a virtual avatar
designed to be either attractive or unattractive. So they had
these virtual avatars that were rated as attractive avatars or
not very attractive ones, and then they had the subjects

(22:31):
who embodied those avatars, who were paired with them interact
with a virtual stranger controlled by a lab assistant, and
subjects with attractive virtual representation. So if you got a
very good looking avatar, they behaved differently than those with
unattractive ones. The virtually attractive players got closer to their

(22:54):
conversation partners, and they shared more personal information with these
virtual rangers than people who had been given unattractive avatars
to perform with. So that's kind of interesting because the
attractiveness of your avatar doesn't change anything about you. Right,
It doesn't change whether you are naturally a confident or
attractive person, does it. Well, that's kind of the question here, right,

(23:17):
It does taking on this virtual skin change your performance?
Are you like fully sleaving yourself into this identity? I mean,
I guess it wouldn't change what you physically look like.
It might have a time, but it doesn't. It doesn't
immediately change what you physically look like, but it might
actually change the way your brain works. In another study,
you found a similar thing. Uh. The researchers found that

(23:39):
the height of a virtual character avatar influenced behavior in
a virtual bargaining task. So they had people go into
a virtual world. You go into like this video game environment,
and you have to bargain with somebody, and people with
taller avatars relative to their virtual conversation partner negotiated more
aggressively than people who are given shorter avatars. So it's

(24:03):
not that you're a taller person in real life, but
if you're just given a taller character to play as
in the virtual world, you act with more like aggressive
bargaining tactics and confidence. Interesting, it becomes a situation where, again,
humans have not evolved for this, we've evolved to deal
with things in the real and when we deal when

(24:24):
we deal with things in the virtual world, we are
still behaving as if we are beholding a physical presence. Yeah,
but maybe that's not so surprising, right, because what this
is is that the avatar is changing our behavior within
the virtual world itself. You're given a character to perform
as inside a virtual world. It changes how you behave

(24:46):
in the virtual world. The big question would be does
this change carry over into the rest of your life, Like,
once you leave the garment of a digital avatar behind,
are there lingering effects? So if you play a giant
for an hour in a virtual environment, or certainly you
embody a giant for that amount of time, do you

(25:07):
then leave your virtual session behaving as a giant. Yes.
And in a two thousand nine study, Y and colleagues
investigated this. So they attempted to replicate the attractiveness study
from the previous paper, right, So you'd get assigned an
avatar that was either attractive or not attractive. And then
they added a second stage to the experiment. They had

(25:27):
an additional task outside the original virtual environment, So subjects
were given an avatar attractive or unattractive. Then they had
to do the interaction task from the first study. Then
after that they left the virtual environment and they were
asked to participate in what they were told was a
different study. It's like, do you want to do another study? Now?
This one was about online dating, and the participants were

(25:50):
asked to create a profile on a college dating site
that had been set up. It was like a mock site,
not a real one. And they were giving photos of
nine people of the gender they were interested in dating,
and then asked to pick two of the nine that
they would most like to get to know better and
get in contact with. And the study found that people
who had been given attractive avatars chose more attractive partners

(26:14):
on the dating site, and people who had been given
less attractive avatars chose less attractive partners to contact on
the dating site. And this would all seem to indicate
that the attractiveness of the virtual character, the avatar they'd
been given, was still shaping self perception and confidence and
behavior even after the players logged out and moved on

(26:35):
to other things. So we we are seeing the lingering
effects then of the virtual body. We are this is
the proteus effect in action. Well, I mean it makes
me wonder. So when I was in seventh grade or whatever,
and I was creating ridiculous looking wrestlers with like huge
legs and stuff to get beat down by stone cold
Steve Austin and my friends and I laughed and thought

(26:57):
it was funny. Did this follow me? How was different
after I stopped playing the game? Or was? I mean,
maybe it had no effect, But did this change who
I was when I was a little mill schooler. Huh,
I don't know. I mean, I'm having to go back
and think on my past a video game experience as well.
I mean, because when one issue that comes up specifically
deals with the use of sexy characters, especially that's sort

(27:22):
of sexy female characters that you often encounter in fantasy
and sci fi properties. You know, maybe it's the their
scantily dressed or we've all seen examples of this where
the uh, the male figure has more traditional armor and
the female figure has armor that makes no sense of
within the confines of an actual combat scenario. It's just

(27:45):
all about revealing the feminine form. Yeah, totally. I remember
before I was even aware, really, when I was much younger,
when I was not really aware yet of feminist critiques
of video games or anything like that. I do remember
seeing some of the character designs for female characters and
thinking my younger self, like that just doesn't make a
lot of sense. I don't think she would be very

(28:06):
warm in that. Yeah, but yeah, obviously this is a
big question in video game design and stuff like that.
The the objectification, especially of female bodies in these games
is a big cultural point to talk about. But the
idea of the proteus effect takes it a little bit
farther right. So it's not just an idea of how
women's bodies are represented in the games and to what

(28:29):
extent the way they're represented is empowering or disempowering, But
it also has to do with how it affects us
to play as these types of characters exactly. So I
ran across a paper that deals with this two thousand
twelve paper titled the Embodiment of Sexualized Virtual Selves, the
Proteus Effect and Experiences of Self Objectification via Avatars. This

(28:53):
is by Jesse Fox, Jeremy In Baylinson, and lose to Case.
So in this study, they took the proteus effect and
they studied it in the light of of two other
key factors. First of all, objectification theory. So this is
the idea that society treats women as depersonalized objects rather

(29:14):
than individuals mere sexual bodies, and that women come to
internalize this and learn to see and value themselves based
on their physical appearance. And this is known as self objectification.
And then the other is rape myth acceptance. So, simply put,
the acceptance of various myths concerning rape, most famously, that

(29:36):
dressing a certain way, going certain places, are behaving in
certain ways means that the woman is quote unquote asking
for it. It's like shifting the blame onto the victim
of the rape. Yeah, yeah, it's it's victim blaming, pure
and simple. It's it's repellent, and it's also truly damaging because,
as the authors point out, past studies have found that
women who accept these myths don't take proper precautions against grape,

(29:59):
and men who accept these myths are more likely to
commit rape. Okay, So the researchers here, they went into
their study with two predictions. First, they figured that the
use of sexualized avatars would result in more body related thoughts.
And then second, participants who wear a sexualized avatar will
express more rape myth acceptance or or r m A. Okay.

(30:19):
So the idea here is if you are given an
avatar in a virtual environment that that has all these
overtly sexualized features, that's designed in a sexually objectified way,
it's going to increase your self objectification and it's going
to increase the likelihood that you will accept these harmful
myths about rape. Right, It's basically one way of looking

(30:43):
at it is Okay, so you have an image of
a scantily clad eleven warrior, Okay, that depiction of even
a non human technically female form that is the at
least partially the result of all of this, these these
cultural energies, the cultural practices and beliefs that are taking
place and uh and sort of pressurizing this into form.

(31:07):
And then if you embody that form, then you are
subject to those uh, those pressures as well. If that
makes sense. Yeah, totally. A lot of the way the
proteus effect seems to work is by importing of stereotyped behavior.
So you there are stereotypes about how a person who
looks like X is supposed to behave When you're given

(31:27):
a character that looks like that looks like X to embody,
you begin behaving with those stereotypes in mind, yeah, and
and so and even subconsciously. It's not necessarily you know,
an avert practice practices going on here. So, this particular
study involved eighty six female participants from a West Coast university,
ages eighteen through forty one, and uh, it was a

(31:50):
reasonably racially diverse group as well. Why twenty four point
four percent Asian or Asian Americans, seven percent Black, too
point three percent Latino, two point three percent multi racial,
and five point eight percent other. And they were placed
in a fully immersive VR RIG. Participants had their photographs
taken with a digital camera for a presumably unrelated study

(32:12):
so that these could be worn as faces, essentially so
they could give their virtual avatar their own face and uh,
and they also allowed for others to uh to wear
an appropriately aged female face that was not their own.
So here's how the study went down. They were randomly
assigned to one of four conditions. Either a sexualized version

(32:36):
of themselves so it's it's their face but the sexualized
avatar body, a sexualized other where they're just in a
sexualized body but it's just somebody else's face on their
random character non sexualized self. So it's you and you know,
I guess you know, you're just dressed in normal virtual
clothing and then non sexualized other where you're a non

(32:59):
sexualized per some of the different face. And then they
had them interact with a male Well, first of all,
they had to look in a mirror to sort of
behold themselves, and then they interacted with a male character.
The researchers found that indeed, participants in sexualized conditions reported
significantly more body related thoughts. UH, So the face itself
had no effect there as for rape myth acceptance of

(33:22):
judged by the use of Bird's r m A scale
from UH which uses a series of questions, this is
what they They found out. Participants who wore the sexualized
self expressed greater r M A than participants with a
sexualized other, and there was no significant difference between the
two non sexualized m v our bodies. Well that's a

(33:43):
disturbing finding. Now, the authors and all this, they acknowledged
that this was a small study limited in scope. You know,
it's just less than a hundred women from a single college.
But they concluded from this that women can be affected
negatively by the avatars they wear and it can alter
their behavior both on and offline. I think that would

(34:03):
be an important thing to keep looking into and see
if you can replicate, because I mean, there are tons
of video games that, as you said, have these overtly
sexualized female bodies that characters or that players in body,
and if it leads to something as truly harmful as
acceptance of dangerous rape myths and victim blaming, this is
something that could have a very strong effect on society

(34:24):
and would be important to know. Yeah, and likewise I
would I would love to see more on the potential
effects on male players as well, because the argument here
is not that that females are wired in a weird
way and therefore are susceptible to this influence, susceptible to
like the sexual proteus effect. Obviously men would be susceptible
to this too, even though the stereotypes that are involved

(34:47):
in this particular study are very female centric. But maby
comes back to the wrestling games for instance. You know,
like what happens if a male player is then putting
their face on this body with this like ridiculous muscle
man Zeke and then engaging in physical violence uh with
a with another character, Like what what kind of protein
effect would that have on the individual? Yeah? I think

(35:09):
one thing that's not clear yet is how potentially strong
this effect is. Um. Now, there are obviously going to
be variables no matter what, even if we don't know
what they are yet, They're gonna be variables that make
this effect stronger or less strong to the extent that
it's true at all. But I wonder how potentially strong
is it? You know what I mean? Like at its

(35:30):
most strong, will it have a little bit of an
effect that we walk away with when we're done playing
the game? Or are there ways that you could tweak
and fine tune the gaming and avatar embodiment experience that
could have radical or revolutionary self editing types of effects?
You know? Like I'm almost wondering if there could be
like avatar therapy, Like you have a person who has

(35:54):
harmful or self destructive types of self perception issues, and
that with a finely tweaked virtual environment and finally tweaked
type of avatar, you could actually treat that sort of condition. Yeah, well,
I mean it just wouldn't be the first time people
have proposed treating or studied the treatment of various ailments
through virtual reality. Different studies into the use of virtuality

(36:16):
to treat nicotine addiction, for example, or a post traumatic
stress disorders. So, uh, I mean that's one of the
things about virtual reality is that there's there, there are
a number of possibilities there beyond mirror entertainment or distraction.
And uh and we should probably cover more of them
on the show. I feel like we've we haven't really

(36:36):
touched on VR and in quite a while. Yeah. Absolutely. Now,
one thing I've read along these lines is that I
came across the study from fourteen applying the idea of
the proteus effect to the idea of exercise games. So
this was a study published by Benjamin Lee at All
in Games for Health Research, Development and Clinical Applications. So

(36:57):
this was a study about exercise as games and how
they can be used to try to encourage fitness behaviors
and children. And study was called we Myself and Size
the influence of proteus effect and stereotype threat on overweight
children's exercise motivation and behavior and excer games. So this
is going to be one example of the kind of
thing I was just talking about, right, like taking advantage

(37:19):
of the proteus effect to try to optimize people's performance
and self improvement behaviors. And the idea here is that
if you can get children to exercise more based on
exercise video games by using different types of avatars. So
they tested a hundred and forty children between nine and
twelve years of age who were overweight. The dependent variables

(37:41):
they tested were exercise attitudes of the children, exercise motivation
that was platform specific, specifically like how motivated are you
to exercise on this we game you've got, and then
finally their their performance inside the exercise game, And what
they ultimately claimed to find is that overweight children who

(38:01):
were given avatars that looked overweight performed worse compared to
children who were given avatars of a normal body size.
So if you're given an avatar that looks fitter, that
looks healthier, you do better in all four of the
dependent variable categories. And they also tested stuff about stereotype

(38:22):
threat like whether giving these children negative stereotypes about exercise
motivation and overweight children would hurt their performance, and that
also did seem to matter. So it turns out that
you don't want to give children negative stereotypes about how
they might perform in these video games if you want
them to do better. But also just changing what the
avatar they use looks like can really matter in how

(38:46):
they do with exercise motivation and exercise performance in the games. Well,
I've never played a fitness video game per se, but
I can I can second see where that would that
would happen effect. Yet again, I want to ask the
question I asked a minute ago. I wonder, to whatever
extent this effect is real, how strong could it possibly be?

(39:06):
Like is the most you could hope for that you'll
get a slight improvement with this kind of thing? Or
could you tweak and keep testing these types of avatar
changes until you find just the right formula to really
make a huge difference in the way people's brains work
in these tasks. Yea. Indeed. Indeed, another interesting way that
I found this being studied was the idea of performing

(39:29):
stereotyped gendered behaviors in video games based on the gender
of the avatar you're you've you've been given, so they're
stereotypes about how certain genders should behave in video games.
One would be that there's a stereotype that females would
like in a in a battle game where you're like
dealing damaged to enemies and then performing healing spells or

(39:53):
something like that, where you're healing yourself and healing others.
This would be a massive multiplayer online deal where you're
you're playing with other human players yea in the virtual realm. Yeah,
So imagine a game like World of war Craft or something.
You can you can like hack at the monster, you
can heal yourself, and the stereotype would say that, well,
male players are gonna hack more and heal less, and

(40:14):
that female players are gonna heal more and hack less
to whatever. That that might not be true about real
performance with gender identity at all, but that's like the
stereotyped idea. And it turns out that players that that
difference doesn't appear so much in the actual gender identities
of players, but it does appear more so with the

(40:35):
virtual identities of characters. So whether or not the player
is actually actually identifies as male or female, the character
that they're playing as in the game will conform to
those stereotyped behaviors. More like people playing as virtual female
characters heal more interesting. Huh. You know, I can't help

(40:55):
but think again about about sky Rim as an example
of a possible example, or at least in an area
for steady and all of this where you have uh,
these various uh official expansions that came out that allowed
your character to not only marry, but to adopt children
and essentially grow a family in this game that's mostly

(41:16):
about killing monsters and exploring, uh, you know, to what
extent does uh does the proteus effect rear? It's it's
ugly head here as well. But indeed, could a game
like Skyrim make you a better parent? I don't know.
I mean, that's a good question. I come back to
something that this is obviously not very original idea. People
have been asking this ever since the days of Doom

(41:36):
and stuff in the nineties. But I wonder about the
proteus effect like effects of first person shooters. I admit
I'm not a big fan of many first person shooters.
The few that I like, you know, I like like
the Bioshot games because they've got interesting environments and storylines
and stuff. But generally I don't really like games where
you just become a gun and you're just walking around

(41:59):
in all you are is a gun poking into the world,
and then that gun shoots. Well there's something kind of
holy in American about that. But uh, but yeah, I
can't think of many games like that that I find
very enjoyable. I don't even bother with them generally now,
but there's something about the embodiment as a gun that
has kind of creepy proteus effect implications. Oh well, I

(42:23):
mean we could, we could go to an entire tangent there,
because on one hand, a gun is a tool that
you hold in the reel, and when you hold a
gun or any tool in the real your body schema
adjust to its presence and that tool or weapon, that gun,
that sword, it becomes an extension of your body. Yeah,
but in these games, it's all you see of your body.
It's the only part of you there is. We need

(42:45):
to play some of the updated ones because like the
latest Doom, your arms are in there because you're you're
ripping open the heads of demons, stopping their faces and
all sorts of of gory effects. Now, at the same
time that I think all this is interesting to wonder about,
I don't want to over speculator oversell confidence on video
game panic because I haven't seen any convincing evidence that

(43:06):
like playing a first person shooter or makes you a
killer or anything like that. But but it does make
you think. All right, well that note, We're gonna take
one more break, and when we come back, we have
a few a few additional ideas I want to share
in some closing thoughts. Alright, we're back. So we were
talking about violent video games and games where you become

(43:28):
a gun or a murderous space marine, or or you know,
any number of of variations on this theme. And uh,
I actually ran across a piece in Ian magazine, which
we we frequently cite. They have a wonderful uh storehouse
of of essays about a variety of topics, always thought provoking. Yeah,

(43:49):
and this was this one by Angela Buckingham makes the
case that murder should be illegal in virtual reality as
well as you know, our actual reality, and she uses
the produce effect to make her case. Yeah, So I
just wanted to read one quick quote from it. She says,
in an immersive virtual environment, what will it be like
to kill? Surely a terrifying, electrifying, even thrilling experience. But

(44:14):
by embodying killers, we risk making violence more tantalizing, training
ourselves in cruelty, and normalizing aggression. The possibility of building
fantasy worlds excites me as a filmmaker, but as a
human being, I think we must be wary. Now. I
can hear all of the video game players out there
in the audience saying like, no, don't limit my freedom.

(44:35):
You know, well you'll you'll say like, hold on, I've
played lots of violent video games that are highly realistic,
and you do all kinds of fighting and destruction and killing.
But I'm a perfectly peaceful person. I would never want
to hurt anybody. Uh, you know, you want to use
your yourself as the anecdotal example against what she's arguing.
But while I'm not saying I agree with her, I

(44:56):
think we should take this idea seriously. Yeah, it's something
to think about that, the idea that as games become
more realistic, as the way we embody the characters we
play in them becomes more immersive and more compelling, the
proteus effects that they produce could become stronger and stronger. Yeah.

(45:16):
And in this uh, this essay, Buckingham references the work
of German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, and uh, and I looked
up an interview with him from two thousands sixteen and
New Scientists. So I'm gonna read this, but I want
to drive home before I even read it. That Metzinger
is not a Luddite. He's not opposed to VR. He's
expressed excitement for the possibilities of VR. But he is

(45:37):
just saying, let us, let us be cautious, let us
study what is happening as we procede. He says, quote,
there may be a risk of depersonalization, whereafter an extended
immersion in a virtual environment, your physical body may seem
unreal to you. Fully immersive experiences have a bigger and
more lasting impact on people's behavior. In psychology, we know

(45:59):
from a rubber hand illusion that our brains can be
fooled into thinking that an inanimate rubber hand is our own.
In v our environments, we can be fooled into thinking
that we are our avatars. Consumers must understand that not
all of the risks are known in advance. There may
be a tiny percentage of the population that has a
certain psychiatric vulnerability, such that binging on VR may result

(46:23):
in a prolonged psychotic episode. One can only speculate. Yet again,
I think that is an idea worth taking very seriously.
Now you can cite the examples, uh, the anecdotes of
you know, I and my friends. We we play these
video games. We play violent games, so we would never
heard a fly. We're you know, we're very nice people,
but you are. They're taking a small sample. When you

(46:46):
apply these stimuli to vast populations, it's possible that some
subset of the population could have very strong responses to them.
I mean, certainly we see this with responses to other
forms of media. Yeah, I mean we know that some
people were more vulnerable to queuing than others, and are
more susceptible to influences from from fiction, from movies, from music, etcetera.

(47:09):
So I think it's interesting that he invokes the idea
of the rubber hand illusion. If you've never seen this research,
you should look up some of these videos on YouTube
or even try it yourself where you can. You can
put two hands on a table and one of them
is your real hand, in the other hand is a
fake hand that's not actually yours, and somebody like maybe

(47:31):
like strokes both hands or something long enough to give
you to get you to start imagining that the fake
hand is also your real hand. Then if you hit
that fake hand with a hammer, people will freak out.
They for a second they think it's their actual hand. Yeah.
And this is another case where I'd love to hear
from listeners who have more experience with with VR video games,

(47:53):
for instance, than we do. UH. For instance, I know
we're both fans of the The Alien Isolation game that
came out a few years back. It's my understanding that
one can play that in a virtual environment, which sounds
absolutely terrifying because when I played that game, I felt
like I was I was actually hiding in uh in
a locker, waiting for the xenomorph to pass. I can't

(48:14):
imagine playing it in a more personal virtual environment. That's
an interesting game because, as we talk about proteus effects
in the way they change our brains, lots of first
person games, as we were talking about earlier, are very
The character has a lot of agency and commits a
lot of violence. Maybe and it's very uh, I don't know,
powerful and dominant. When you're you're in doom or something

(48:37):
and you become a gun and you're just killing all
these monsters in this Alien game and some other recent
generation of horror games. You're very powerless. You have nothing
you can really do to beat the monster. It's a
it's a it's about hiding, and it's about cleverness and
powerlessness and how to to sneak away and survive. And
it's a very different type of experience than a lot

(48:58):
of other games of this generation. Yeah, and it really
more more fitting with the human condition. Right. We don't
succeed in life by being just unstoppable killing machines. We
we do it by by hiding in lockers and under
tables and waiting till the danger passes and holding your breath.
That's right, you gotta hold your breath. It's always important. Now.
I guess one thing we could say here is that

(49:19):
we've sort of strayed a little bit from the core
of the Proteus effects, because we've gone on to just
talk about how the whole game mechanics, you know, everything
about a video game can change the way we think
the things you have to do in it, the you know,
the type of visual experience it is. But to bring
it back to the idea of the avatar itself, not
what the game is, but the the appearance and the

(49:43):
and the attributes of the character you play as, and
how that can shape your mind. I am brought to
a question that goes outside of virtual environments, or maybe
goes actually to get back to the very place we started,
the analogy between virtual environments and the only thing like
them in in prehistory being being the imagination. Robert, I'm

(50:04):
curious if in your Dungeons and Dragons experiences you've ever
seen anything like the proteus effect, Like do the characters
people create for a D and D session change the
way the players themselves behave once even once they leave
the game, even when not explicitly role playing, Like does

(50:24):
a person playing a lawful good paladin take a break
to order pizza differently from that same player if they're
currently running some chaotic evil beasts that eats people. That's
a great question, um, I have to say I will.
First of all, there are different types of players, and
some get into the role playing aspect of it more

(50:46):
than others. The people I play with, none of them,
none of them are using a chaotic evil character, or
like every everybody's character seems to be a partial extension
of their own personality, but maybe they're leaning into certain
things more than others. Like one player, it was more

(51:06):
was very argumentative as his character, but he's also a
little bit argumentative in life, right, but maybe he was
a little more argumentative when when he was playing his character.
Another plays a character that is a that is kind
of gregarious, and I could see sometimes I see him
behaving in a gregarious way that seems like an extension
of his character. But it's kind of a chicken and

(51:27):
egg scenario. They're right, you know, are they They're not
necessarily acting out in a way that is different from themselves.
They're just sort of leaning into this, uh, this this
version of who they already are. Well, another way to
think about that is that they could actually be using
some version of the proteus effect. A little bit different
because it's not in virtual environments, but let's let's go

(51:49):
back to a virtual environment. I think people could use
some version of the proteus effect to essentially intentionally edit
to their own personality. You know, it's kind of hard
to change who you are, but I would say that
the most sure fire way to make changes to yourself
is not through thinking about them, but through doing things

(52:11):
right if you want to change who you are, change
your behavior first, and your nature will follow. And and
to that point, I have to say that the people
that I've played with, they tend to they tend to
want to be noble. They want to they want to
be the heroes of the story and and save the day,
which is great because that's the kind of game I
want to play. Uh And in d M, I don't

(52:33):
really want to d M a game where everyone is
a is a marauding jerk quad, right and they're just
tearing apart towns, because then that does begin to feel
a little icky, I would think. But but then again,
I would love to hear from anyone out there who's
been in a game like that. Have you have you
been in a chaotic evil essentially? Like like maybe there's

(52:54):
a there's a Blood Meridian role playing montule out there
that people are really crazy about and you can tell
me about it that I for one would not want
to run or participate in in the Blood Cormick McCarthy
Blood Meridian Dungeons and Dragons kind of campaign. And then
everybody just fights over whether they get to be Judge Holden. Yeah, Well,
I mean I would hope Judge Holden is an MPC.

(53:16):
But yeah, well, but that's an idea, Like you just
have a party of Judge Holden's rolling around horrible, Why
would that be even fun? Don't know, I don't know,
But okay, So I was talking about the idea of
editing the self. Now you can imagine to whatever extent
the proteus effect is real, and that you could exploit
it to intentionally edit your own personality in a direction

(53:40):
of your choosing. Right, So you could say, like, what
if I want to be a character more like X,
you could intentionally seek out virtual environments where you have
to play as a character who has those attributes you're seeking. Essentially,
you'd be virtually faking it till you make it. You'd
be enacting the behavior to shape yourself in the real

(54:03):
world as a byproduct. Interesting. Yeah, again we get back
to the idea of VR therapy. But you know, to
allude to another episode we've done before, do you think
there might be a proteus effect in place with the
game of Werewolf for Mafia? Oh, I wonder is it
does that? Displaying that game again, we're getting a little

(54:23):
bit off of the core of the proteus effect. Having
to do with avatars and getting more into like game
mechanics and behavior. But yeah, that does it train you
to be a liar? Like if you play a werewolf
a lot, does it make you a less honest person? Yeah?
Or just a paranoid and judgmental person. Oh yeah, I
want to offer one more weird take. See what you

(54:44):
think about this. Maybe this is a terrible take all right,
though I also think I can't be the first person
to suggest this, so I'm sure other people have written
about this. Social media, we've been talking about m m
O RPGs, massive multiple multiplayer online RPGs. I would say
so shoal media today is an m m O RPG.

(55:05):
Not It's not just like one. It literally is one.
It is a massive multiplayer online role playing game. If
you just take Twitter for example, It's a massive online
environment in which you create a character, and that character
is based on you, but isn't actually you. It is
a representation of you, composed of little segments of information

(55:29):
and behavior that you choose to add to that profile
of that version of you. It's character you create, interacting
with millions more who are doing the same thing, playing
roles of a character. They've created. And some players are
casual and they don't play very much, and they don't
play the role very consistently. They just pop in and out.
Others are power players and kind of addicts of the game.

(55:51):
They play it all the time. Sometimes these players form
loose teams and go out and fight oppositely aligned enemy
players in the very ruel space. I think Twitter really
does work in a lot of ways, kind of like
one of these games like World of Warcraft or something,
except the character creation is just less constrained by the
fantasy environment of the game. Now that's a good point.

(56:15):
That's a good point. I feel like we could, really
we could go wild with that concept, discussing how social
media changes who we are. Yeah, but I mean, I
think on this model you have to wonder about the
feedback loop of how the character you create on social
media feeds back into who you actually are, and how
that changes the way you play your character online. It

(56:36):
creates some kind of self sustaining feedback loop. But in
what what drives that loop and in what direction does
it go. Here's one more scary thought. So in all
of this, we invoke the mythic proteus and seemingly you know,
it's just meant to refer to the idea of changeing forms.
And I don't think there's actually more to it than that.
But if we're to have fun with the concept, let's
not forget that. Proteus also had that gift of unerring.

(57:00):
No uh so, not normally would he prophesies the future.
But his his visions were absolutely they were, they were unquestionable,
so he forced to. He can tell you who you are,
who you will be, what you will do. And I
wonder if the danger, or perhaps the promise in some
cases here of the produce effect isn't that it will

(57:21):
make you someone that you are not, but it will
let you become who you really are. Well, it makes
me ask the question, who are we? But what we are?
What more could we do? Being what we are? You are,
what you do, even if it's online, Just do it all? Right.
On On that note, we want to remind you check

(57:41):
out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's we
will find all the episodes of the podcast. You'll also
find links out to our various social media accounts such
as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And big thanks as always
to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison.
If you would like to get in touch with us,
the host of this show, to let us know a
topic you'd like us to cover in the future, or
do you give us feedback on this episode or any other,

(58:04):
or just to share some thoughts with us or say hi,
You can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com