What are social experiments
Social experiments are described as being: "an experiment with human subjects, which typically investigates effects on groups of persons" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_experiment).
Various people did all sorts of social experiments in order to study human behaviour, to gauge the effect of certain stimuli on the human mind, or purely for medical reasons. For this project I am interested in researching social experiments done with the purpose of analysing human behaviour patterns and how they can be affected by changes of circumstances, changes of environment, or maybe, even when individuals are role playing. If role playing is proved to produce "mutations" in personality and character, then I think, my initial question: Are games just social experiments? will have an answer, as any video game player is basically inheriting a different set of characteristics form the game character while playing. Will he or she be affected by this in real life, will they forget when the game is over and console is shut down, that they are here, now, or will they carry on behaving as a soldier/assassin/race driver/cowboy/samurai, etc?
In August of 1971, the Stamford Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led an experiment called The Stamford Prison Experiment. The aim was to study the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard.
"Twenty-four male students out of seventy-five were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. Certain portions of the experiment were filmed and excerpts of footage are publicly available.
Zimbardo and his team aimed to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. Participants were recruited and told they would participate in a two-week prison simulation. Out of 70 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected the 24 males whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These participants were predominantly white and middle-class.[3] The group was intentionally selected to exclude those with criminal background, psychological impairments or medical problems. They all agreed to participate in a 7–14-day period and received $15 per day (roughly equivalent to $85 in 2012).
The experiment was conducted in the basement of Jordan Hall (Stanford's psychology building). Twelve of the twenty-four participants were assigned the role of prisoner (nine plus three alternates), while the other twelve were assigned the role of guard (also nine plus three alternates). Zimbardo took on the role of the superintendent, and an undergraduate research assistant the role of the warden. Zimbardo designed the experiment in order to induce disorientation, depersonalization and deindividualization in the participants.
The researchers held an orientation session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners. In the footage of the study, Zimbardo can be seen talking to the guards: "You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy ... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."[4]
The researchers provided the guards with wooden batons to establish their status,[5] clothing similar to that of an actual prison guard (khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus store), and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact. Prisoners wore uncomfortable ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps, as well as a chain around one ankle. Guards were instructed to call prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name.
The prisoners were arrested at their homes and charged with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. They were transported to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip searched and given their new identities.
The small mock prison cells were set up to hold three prisoners each. There was a small space for the prison yard, solitary confinement, and a bigger room across from the prisoners for the guards and warden. The prisoners were to stay in their cells all day and night until the end of the study. The guards worked in teams of three for eight-hour shifts. The guards did not have to stay on site after their shift." (Stanford_prison_experiment)
check out http://www.prisonexp.org/psychology/31
...
possible ending for the essay:
"Really though, this is already happening in video games, where non-player characters are becoming ever more complex, both in terms of visual representation and “intelligence”. In narrative adventures like Mass Effect and The Walking Dead, players stay with the same characters over the course of several games, communicating with them through simple conversation trees and trying to keep them safe through endless dangerous encounters with aliens and zombies. Mass Effect even allows players to form sexual relationships with other characters, which can have a profound impact on the gaming experience – even if the sense of reciprocity is minimal. In Mass Effect, the love affairs are story functions and the AI characters merely pawns in a set of narrative possibilities. They don’t love you back. Not really.
But what if they could? In some ways this is more likely than the scenario envisaged in Her. Unlike operating systems, which are the practical interface between us and the computer, video games provide a playful environment in which we’re invited to identify with the onscreen avatars and events. Just as literature has done for hundreds of years, games invite us to identify with characters, they function to make us feel. It may be just a matter of time before a clever game designer uses cutting edge AI routines to simulate emotion. We know that basic speech recognition and conversational abilities are already possible, but can these be extended from chatbot programs into sophisticated game characters?
Will we see AIs capable of falling for players?"
