Real Behavior in Virtual Environments:Psychology Experiments in a Simple Virtual-Reality

Paradigm Using Video Games

Michail D. Kozlov, B.Sc., and Mark K. Johansen, Ph.D.

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to illustrate the broad usefulness of simple video-game-based virtual envi-ronments (VEs) for psychological research on real-world behavior. To this end, this research explored severalhigh-level social phenomena in a simple, inexpensive computer-game environment: the reduced likelihood ofhelping under time pressure and the bystander effect, which is reduced helping in the presence of bystanders. Inthe first experiment, participants had to find the exit in a virtual labyrinth under either high or low timepressure. They encountered rooms with and without virtual bystanders, and in each room, a virtual personrequested assistance. Participants helped significantly less frequently under time pressure but the pres-ence=absence of a small number of bystanders did not significantly moderate helping. The second experimentincreased the number of virtual bystanders, and participants were instructed to imagine that these were realpeople. Participants helped significantly less in rooms with large numbers of bystanders compared to roomswith no bystanders, thus demonstrating a bystander effect. These results indicate that even sophisticated high-level social behaviors can be observed and experimentally manipulated in simple VEs, thus implying the broadusefulness of this paradigm in psychological research as a good compromise between experimental control andecological validity.

Introduction

‘‘Help me!’’ shouts a distressed alien. Though improb-able in real life, many people frequently encounter similar

situations in computer games. Sixty-five percent of Americanhouseholds play video games,1 and in these they make so-phisticated decisions and engage in complex social interactions.So it is surprising how few researchers have adopted simplevideo-game virtual reality (VR) for research, particularly asmany games come with editors for easy content modification.

VR permits the controlled staging of situations that aredifficult to set up in real life, whilst allowing real behavior. Inaddition, game VR is cheap, readily available, easy to ma-nipulate and, due to its widespread use as a recreationalmedium, far less obtrusive than sophisticated fully immersiveVR. Further, as the present experiments demonstrate, evenclassic findings on high-level social behaviors, like helping,can be observed and experimentally manipulated in simplegame VR (see Figure 1), thus demonstrating that it is a widelyuseful tool for psychological research.

Helping others is a sophisticated high-level social behav-ior. Two classic factors that affect people’s real-world helping

are time pressure and the presence of others. The Good Sa-maritan study2 demonstrated that people are less likely tohelp when in a hurry. Theology students, who were either ontime or late for a talk on the Good Samaritan, encountered aman in need and helped less when late. Similarly, in a classicstudy,3 participants completed a questionnaire either alone orwith bystanders whilst a simulated emergency occurred nearby. Participants in the presence of others were less likelyto help, thus exhibiting the widely replicated ‘‘bystandereffect.’’4,5

Virtual Environments: A Venue for ObservingComplex Behavior

It has been argued6 that helping behavior research, like alot of psychological research, faces a trade-off between ex-perimental control and ecological validity. Studies using vi-gnettes4,5 present participants with an artificial situation,potentially eliciting artificial responses. On the other hand,creating more realistic social situations, for example usingconfederates, reduces experimental control. Indeed, in theGood Samaritan study,2 some participants insisted on taking

School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom.

CYBERPSYCHOLOGY, BEHAVIOR, AND SOCIAL NETWORKING

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the confederate for a coffee during the experiment. Usingimmersive VR for psychological research has been suggestedas a compromise.6

In immersive VR, people see a virtual world through ahead-mounted display (HMD) and can interact with thisworld via sensors in ways controlled by the experimenter.These environments can be highly realistic, as illustrated by areplication of Milgram’s7 classic experiment on obediencewith a virtual victim.8

However, the sophisticated apparatus needed to create animmersive virtual environment (VE), such as a large HMDand so on, makes the experimental environment highly sa-lient and thus tends to offset realistic immersion.9 In con-trast, sitting at a computer and playing a game, likeparticipants may frequently do anyway, can make the ex-perimental environment much less salient and allow morenatural behavior. Thus simple game VR can reasonably re-place fully immersive VR. In fact, real-world low-level socialbehaviors such as interpersonal proximity and gaze direc-tion have been demonstrated in the online game SecondLife.10 Additionally, properties of video-game charactershave been shown to influence attitudes measured in the realworld.11

The purpose of our research was to argue for the generalusefulness of simple game VR in the experimental study ofreal-world behavior, rather than just treating VR as in inter-esting but distinct behavioral reality. We did this by testingwhether high-level social decision making, like whether tohelp, can be observed in simple game VR. Our intent was toreplicate the effects of bystanders and time pressure onhelping behavior in an inexpensive game environment, thepopular 3D shooter Half-Life 2. We used this environmentinstead of the massively multiplayer online games like SecondLife or World of Warcraft, because Half-Life 2 can be more easilymanipulated.

Experiment 1

In this simple VR experiment, participants were instructedto get to the exit in a 3D labyrinth. Like in the Good Samaritanstudy,2 they were instructionally placed under high or lowtime pressure. Walking in first-person perspective through

hallways and rooms, participants had several opportunitiesto assist a virtual person asking for help in the presence orabsence of virtual bystanders.

Method

Participants. Forty undergraduate psychology studentsfrom Cardiff University, 2 male and 18 female in the time-pressure condition and 6 male and 14 female in the no-time-pressure condition, participated for course credit.a

Design. This study was a 2�2 mixed factorial design,with time pressure, high or low, as a between-subjects factorand the presence=absence of virtual bystanders as a within-subjects factor. The time pressure was manipulated via theinstructions, and some rooms in the labyrinth had bystanderswhile others did not, counterbalanced across participants.Helping behavior was measured as the number of rooms inwhich help was provided.

Materials. The virtual labyrinth contained 18 rooms: anintroduction room, two observation rooms, 14 assistancerooms, and an exit room. In the observation rooms, partici-pants saw a virtual person assisting another virtual person. Inthe assistance rooms, participants could choose to help or not.A virtual person would ask them to break some crates, be-hind which he was stuck. Participants had a virtual crowbarto do so. There were virtual bystanders in seven of theserooms who displayed various casual movements like turningtheir heads but ignored requests for assistance.

Procedure. Participants were told that they were aboutto enter a virtual labyrinth and that their main task was toget to the exit. One instruction sheet warned the participantsto progress through the labyrinth quickly, while the othersaid they had plenty of time. They were told about thevirtual people in the labyrinth who might try to interactwith them but were reminded that such interactions wouldtake time. They also received instructions on the use of themouse and keyboard to navigate and interact with the en-vironment. Lastly, they were told that doors leading to theexit were designated by a red cage light. The participantsthen moved around the introduction room until comfortablewith the controls and before being left alone to complete thetask.

Results and discussion

Participants under low time pressure (M¼ 4.53, SD¼ 2.6)helped significantly more often than participants under timepressure as shown in Figure 2 (M¼ 1.18, SD¼ 1.65), F(1,38)¼ 24.39, p< 0.001, op2¼ 0.37. However, the presence=absence of bystanders did not significantly influence helping(M¼ 2.95, SD¼ 2.75; M¼ 2.75, SD¼ 2.77), F(1, 38)¼ 1.587,p¼ 0.215, op2¼ 0.01. Still, even under time pressure, partici-pants did provide some help and did not just ignore theenvironment.b

These results are partly consistent with previous research:like in the Good Samaritan study,2 participants in a hurryhelped less. However, in contrast to previous research,3 by-standers did not seem to influence helping. One possible ex-planation for the absence of the bystander effect is that notall published studies have actually found the effect,12 and even

FIG. 1. A room with 19 virtual bystanders.

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this is conservative due to the widespread tendency for non-publication of null results. Similarly, our failure to find the effectin Experiment 1 could possibly have been due to a lack of power.

A more plausible explanation for the absence of the effecthere is that the factors widely implicated in the bystandereffect, namely diffusion of responsibility and fear of embar-rassment,12 were relatively weak in Experiment 1 becausethe other ‘‘people’’ were so obviously computer controlled.It seems likely that participants felt relatively little embar-rassment or lack of responsibility in the presence of thesecomputer-controlled characters. Note that this is not a fun-damental limitation of our proposed methodology as, at leastpotentially, other characters in the VE could be controlled byreal people over a network. However, we tried a simplerapproach, as it has been shown that being primed with eventhe image of a crowd is sufficient to produce a reduction inaltruistic behaviors, and in addition the number of people inthe crowd moderates the effect.5 Although we have not foundany research on the effect that has directly evaluated whatconstitutes ‘‘a crowd,’’ it is plausible that the few virtual by-standers who sat in the corners of the perceptually large ex-perimental labyrinth rooms did not invoke a particularlystrong sense of a crowd. The manipulations in Experiment 2were based on these observations.

Experiment 2

This experiment was designed to intensify the bystander-effect manipulation in Experiment 1 by increasing the numberof bystanders, as several previous studies have argued thatthe presence of more people—whether physical,12 imagined,5

or in online chat rooms13—makes helping less likely due togreater diffusion of responsibility and, potentially, due to astronger sense of being in a crowd. Furthermore, people seemmore likely to be socially influenced in VR the more humanthey consider the characters.6 So participants were instructedto imagine that the virtual characters were real people.

Method

Participants. Twenty-nine participants from the samepopulation as the first study (9 males and 20 females) par-ticipated in this experiment.

Design, materials, and procedure. This experiment wassimilar to the low time-pressure condition in Experiment 1,

except that here participants were told to ‘‘imagine that thevirtual people in the labyrinth represent real people.’’ In ad-dition, bystander-present rooms had 19 instead of 4 peoplec

(see Figure 1).

Results and discussion. Increasing the number of by-standers and imagining that the virtual people were real re-sulted in significantly less helping in the presence ofbystanders compared with in the absence of bystanders(M¼ 3.45, SD¼ 2.6; M¼ 4.14, SD¼ 2.8), t(28)¼�2.281,p¼ 0.03, two tailed, op2¼ 0.127. So these intensifying ma-nipulations resulted in a bystander effect, consistent withstudies set in the real world.3,12

General Discussion

Both the bystander effect and time-pressure reducedhelping occurred in a virtual gaming environment, thoughseveral key factors influencing these effects were likelymoderated by beliefs about the reality of this environment.Our results emphasize the usefulness of simple game VR as avenue for psychological experimentation, particularly as re-presenting a reasonable trade-off between experimentalcontrol and ecological validity.6 Although the environmentand controls in our experiments were simplistic, even in re-lation to the full potential of the game we used, participantsbehaved similarly to previous experiments conducted in real-life settings with human actors. This suggests that a widevariety of behavioral effects, from bystander apathy and timepressure2,3 to prototype effects in categorization to variousassociative learning phenomena, can be observed and effec-tively manipulated in this environment.

But why should using VEs be better than using vignettes?After all, effects like the bystander apathy can be observedusing simple questionnaires.5 But questionnaires only mea-sure intentions to help, which is arguably very different fromactually helping, even if the person is not real.14 Yet, thepresent study demonstrated that it is possible to obtainmeasures of real-world behavior under well-controlled con-ditions using simple VEs.

Clearly further research is needed to identify the factorsthat make behavior in simple VR less or more like behavior inreality. For example, it is not clear whether it was the changein instructions or the increase in bystanders that contributedto the occurrence of the bystander effect in the second ex-periment but not in the first. In addition, manipulating theplausibility that VR characters are representative of andcontrolled by other human beings, like in Second Life, seemslikely to be important.

A key advantage of even simple VR is that it can be used tostudy things that are hard to manipulate in the real world. Forexample, one study15 used the simple VR in Half-Life 2 toobserve people’s building-escape behavior during a fire. Evenethically questionable paradigms like Milgram’s7 research onobedience can be replicated in a VE,8 allowing researchers tomanipulate the realism of the situation and thus potentiallythe discomfort of participants. This suggests future researchpossibilities such as replications of the ethically problematicStanford Prison Experiment16 and even extreme manipula-tions such as virtual gender reassignment.

A strong argument against using VEs in psychologicalresearch has traditionally been the high cost and technical

FIG. 2. The average frequency of help in 14 assistancerooms as a function of bystander presence and time pressure.The error bars are�1 standard error.

REAL BEHAVIOR IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS 713

difficulty of using the apparatus. Further, the complexity ofthe technology in terms of HMD, cables, and so on may ac-tually offset any feeling of environmental immersion.9 Again,the present research emphasizes that inexpensive videogames with free content editors provide a practical solution tothese problems for broad areas of psychology. If simplecomputer games can be used to research high-level socialbehavior, then they are likely to be at least as useful forsuch diverse areas as learning, memory, reasoning, andperception.

Notes

a. Our results showed some indications of greater malethan female helping behavior, but there were not enoughmale participants to reach firm conclusions. Yet this isunlikely to have affected the results as the male=femaledistribution was not significantly different across con-ditions (w2 [1, N¼ 40]¼ 2.5, p¼ 0.11).

b. After the experiment, the participants were given a shortquestionnaire, which determined whether they had a lotor little experience of playing computer games, whetherthey were familiar with the bystander effect, and whe-ther this familiarity had influenced their behavior. Noneof the factors had a significant effect on the results.

c. Maximum number supported by our hardware.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Erika Baker, GeoffreyHaddock, Gregory Maio, and Andrew Thomas for providingfeedback and useful discussion on a prior draft of this man-uscript.

Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

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Address correspondence to:Michail D. Kozlov

64 Park PlaceSchool of Psychology

Cardiff UniversityCardiff

United KingdomCF10 3AS

E-mail: kozlovm@cardiff.ac.uk

714 KOZLOV AND JOHANSEN