How VR is used by psychologists to profile your personality
Virtual fall
As part of our study, we used head-mounted VR displays and handheld controllers, but we also attached sensors to people’s feet. These sensors allowed participants to test out a block before stepping onto it with both feet.
As participants made their way across the ice, some blocks would crack and change colour when participants stepped onto them with one foot or both feet. As the experiment progressed, the number of crack blocks increased.
We also included a few fall blocks. These treacherous blocks were identical to crack blocks until activated with both feet, when they shattered and participants experienced a short but uncomfortable virtual fall.
We found that as we increased the number of crack and fall blocks, participants’ behavior became more cautious and considered. We saw a lot more testing with one foot to identify and avoid the cracks and more time spent considering the next move.
But this tendency towards risk-averse behavior was more pronounced for participants with a higher level of a personality trait called neuroticism. People with high neuroticism are more sensitive to negative stimuli and potential threat.
Personality and privacy
We had participants complete a personality scale before performing the study. We specifically looked at neuroticism, as this measures the extent to which each person is likely to experience negative emotions such as anxiety and fear. And we found that participants with higher levels of neuroticism could be identified in our sample based on their behavior. These people did more testing with one foot and spent longer standing on “safe” solid blocks when the threat was high.
Neuroticism is one of the five major personality traits most commonly used to profile people. These traits are normally assessed by a self-report questionnaire, but can also be assessed based on behavior – as demonstrated in our experiment.
Our findings show how users of VR could have their personality profiled in a virtual world. This approach, where private traits are predicted based on implicit monitoring of digital behavior, was demonstrated with adatasetderived from Facebook likes back in 2013. This paved the way for controversial commercial applications and theCambridge Analytica scandal– when psychological profiles of users were allegedly harvested and sold to political campaigns. And our work demonstrates how the same approach could be applied to users of commercial VR headsets, which raises major concerns for people’s privacy.
Users should know if their data is being tracked, whether historical records are kept, whether data can be traced to individual accounts, along with what the data is used for and who it can be shared with. After all, we wouldn’t settle for anything less if such a comprehensive level of surveillance could be achieved in the real world.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyStephen Fairclough, Professor of Psychophysiology in the School of Psychology,Liverpool John Moores Universityunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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