Scenarios for Discussion of Ethical and Legal Issues - Scenario 1: Experimental Uses of VEs
We (Ralph Schroeder and Eric Meyer of the Oxford Internet Institute and WinG4) present some scenarios which pose questions about ethics and legal issues to stimulate discussion. Please jump in and tell us you what you think about them!
Consider the following scenario: A social psychology professor has set up an experiment in an immersive environment that is designed to study language and gender in the interaction between avatars. In the course of the experiment, an avatar controlled by a researcher exhibits abusive behaviour toward a participant’s avatar.
What are the research ethics issues raised by such an experiment? What if a participant’s avatar responds violently to the abuse and attacks the researcher avatar? Does this raise additional ethical issues? More generally, how far should these experiments go in interactions between avatars in immersive environments? Are the limits different than for face-to-face research? Can you think of examples of similar research taking place?
- Login to post comments
To stimulate, structure and support the Presence research community.
For the community, by the community.
User login
Navigation
Active forum topics
Presence sights
A holosafety scale?
Hello,
In this type of scenario I would propose there is not black or white answer: it all depends on the degree of realism! I would therefore like to consider a scale we may call the Holodeck-Safety scale (HS), say ranging from 1 to 5.
You may do some types of experiments up to some HS value, as dictated by ethics boards. If the degree of realism is extreme (HS-5), then even telling the subject of an experiment that they are about to be part of an experiment in a holodeck without real people, will not warrant the mental or physical safety of the subject. I can think of many gore scenarios in which this could happen, but I will spare you!
I view the brain as a multi-layer system (in the data processing sense, from senses to perceptions to meaning layers), and fooling 90% of the layers into believing may do a lot of damage already.
Here is a rapid sketch of what this scale may look like:
That is, the idea is that we are today experimenting with HS-1 and HS-2 technologies. Realism is weak. Someday we will get to HS-5 (and yes, the world will have changed a lot).
By the way, I would like to add that we have to be careful with words. By "realism" here I don't mean that we can create scenarios which are very real (e.g., found in nature). Rather, that we can make subjects feel (and therefore act) like what they are experiencing is real. This is the key behind the RAVE idea, and I believe it is confusing to some of its critics.
Giulio Ruffini, Starlab
Increasing realism and responsibility of reasearchers
I agree that with 'increasing realism' also the ethical impact increases. However, I would say that even on the first level the basic ethical problem exists.
A first one should take into consideration the environtment in which the interaction takes place: it is not open (like in mass applications) but a closed scientific setting. Even more interesting, it is the researcher who becomes 'abusive', so this seems to be intended.
I would conclude: the core issue is not Presence technology in itself and its 'realism' but the experimental design: If the goal of the experiment is to study abusive behaviour with VR technologies, then it is up to the responsible researcher to observe at what point the stress for the subjects is no longer reconciliable with the codes of conduct for experiments. Under this condition, abusive behaviour could be tolerable or even desirable to some 'degree'. If the goal of the experiment is different then the codes of conduct do not allow this kind of behaviour.
From this point of view Presence technologies change and 'augment' the ethical responsiblity of the researcher which he already had for the similar experiments in reality.