has anyone else noticed this?
for those of you who've taken a psychology course in your lives you may have heard about the Stanford Prison experiment. those that have not feel free to do some independent research.
anyway - has anyone else noticed a similar trend in survivor to killer relations? or is it just me?
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I think for some it definitely can.
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isnt it fascinating?
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I don't get the analogue between the two...... Like at all. Who are the prisoners and who are the guards? Who are the authority figures briefing the participants on what is expected of them? Who are the observers? All of these things play an integral role to the experiment and are either not present in the game or have only a loose comparison between one and the other. It just doesn't make any sense.
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Yeah, it's not a completely accurate comparison, but there is definitely a similar kind of 'othering' involved. Particularly with those who primarily only play one side.
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I remember hearing about this in uni. I was honestly shocked by the outcome of the experiment, but I don't think that's what happening here. Sure, some people are attracted to the role of Killer so they can live out power fantasies (similar to scumbags who become police officers as it gives them the tools they desire to harm others). But I think most of the toxicity is just a result of spending too much time online, hidden behind anonymity.
There's a wealth of research looking into the effects of spending excessive amounts of time socialing online and not socialing in person. Long story short, we read a person's tone of voice, facial expressions and body language to understand if the things we say or do are making them uncomfortable. You don't get this feedback from online interactions, and the online world tends to promote being loud and abrasive, as this is how you stand out from the millions of people you are competing with for attention. The combination of a lack of social feedback, the ability to seek out those who agree with us and block those that don't, behavioural tendencies learned from a place like Twitter and anonymity often results in a person becoming what we would describe as toxic.
As miserable as 5 gen hook campers make me (the only thing I find myself getting annoyed by), I forget them as soon as I meet a Chad Huntress doing an only hatchets run. Maybe if we could focus our minds on the fun interactions we have with each other rather than zeroing in on the bad ones, we wouldn't fall into otherism, where the other side is completely irredeemable.
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Indeed. Both survivors and killers can become "guards" here. They see the "prisoner" as more as a potential bullying victim than as an opponent or a peer. The tools given to you on both sides in DbD make living out the role of "guy that makes everyone else miserable" pretty straightforward and easy to do.
The Prison Experiment was a fairly rapid devolution of normal social behavior, due to one side being given enormous power with zero consequences right from the get-go.
In DbD, the power takes some time to acquire, but the fact stands that it's not difficult to engineer a situation with a massively lop-sided power balance (e.g. slugging a survivor and standing over them for four minutes, or using an exploit that makes your survivor impossible to catch/hook etc).
Since it's a video game, the "zero consequences" part is there in full swing, however.
It's not a bad analogy. Requires connecting a couple dots, but it works. We all know exactly how certain players behave if you give them the chance; like a child torturing a small animal they have captured. The reason why you see it in DbD and not so much in other games is due to how much control each player has over each other player. It's really not hard to engineer a situation where you can turn the game into a bullying simulator, which is why you see people try to do it so often (then instantly DC when they fail)
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I dont see it personally, made a good film though ngl.
I guess for some it can be, like maybe someone swaps to a certain side and thinks "time to be toxic" or "time to play this way" but I think the majority just play to their own preferences over mimicking the role
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Just gonna say if you're going to use the Stanford Prison Experiment as the entire premise of your discussion, it's on you to actually explain what that is for those that don't know, as @BenOfMilam did, than just say "feel free to do some independent research." Otherwise all you're doing is preventing the very discussion you seem to want to have for no good reason
Per Wikipedia:
The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a psychological experiment conducted in the summer of 1971. It was a two-week simulation of a prison environment that examined the effects of situational variables on participants' reactions and behaviors. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led the research team who administered the study.[1]
Participants were recruited from the local community with an ad in the newspapers offering $15 per day to male students who wanted to participate in a "psychological study of prison life." Volunteers were chosen after assessments of psychological stability, and then randomly assigned to being prisoners or prison guards.[2] Critics have questioned the validity of these methods.[3]
Those volunteers selected to be "guards" were given uniforms specifically to de-individuate them, and instructed to prevent prisoners from escaping. The experiment officially started when "prisoners" were arrested by real Palo Alto police. Over the following five days, psychological abuse of the prisoners by the "guards" became increasingly brutal. After psychologist Christina Maslach visited to evaluate the conditions, she was upset to see how study participants were behaving and she confronted Zimbardo. He ended the experiment on the sixth day.[4]
SPE has been referenced and critiqued as one of the most unethical psychology experiments in history. The harm inflicted on the participants prompted universities worldwide to improve their ethics requirements for human subjects of experiments to prevent them from being similarly harmed. Other researchers have found it difficult to reproduce the study, especially given those constraints.[5] Critics have described the study as unscientific and fraudulent.
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This is my first time hearing of this myself, but my understanding is it was an experiment to see how people would respond when separated into the roles of prisoner and guard and things got very brutal very quickly.
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Surprised no one has brought up how the Stanford Prison Experiment has recently been criticized not just for ethical violations, but potentially just being a sham.
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication
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good conversation everyone. i enjoyed reading the insights.
@crogers271 @EntitySpawn @BenOfMilam @CatnipLove @Seraphor @YOURFRIEND
i particularly found the statement about the experiment possibly being a sham interesting. i hope you'd be willing to elaborate. i will check out the articles you've provided.
ben and catnip's posts provided a lot of information on the background of the experiement, but here are my thoughts FRIEND since you asked
guards are killers, observers are community leaders, prisoners are survivors, scientists are developers.
outside of this one matrix there are also other analogies i can make using various perspectives of whom is who. but this is the initial thought sequence.
@Zeidoktor i understand your concern, but i was intentionally snubbing replies from those who did not know and did not care to know. the fact that you bothered to investigate on your own shows you're interested and willing to facilitate discussion even without my interference. so it was intentional. i hope that explains my reasoning. as you can see from the responses there was indeed discussion even without my involvement.
as far as the topic you pulled from the wikipedia - yes. that's the correct one. it's taught in several courses that also cover classical conditioning by pavlov and self actualizatuon by maslow. sometimes freud which is fun. essentially what you said from the wiki is correct.
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Shocking discovery, people on the internet treat each other badly, especially in a game where they are competing against one another.
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I probably can't elaborate much beyond the articles, but I'll try.
Many early psychological studies have come under attack for not being able to be replicated. These studies did not have the general checks you would have against observer bias. Basically, the study author saw what he wanted to see and helped make what he wanted. In Stanford you see the person doing the study also participating as one of the roles, which completely throws out the ability to do a neutral evaluation.
Not to mention many of the studies are so small that they could just be a false positive (i.e. coincidence). And in some cases (covered in the Vox article) the authors hid data that would contradict their theory.
With the Stanford case you see some of the participants say they were behaving that way because they thought they were more playing a role (wikipedia even has a note about the guards being instructed to be more brutal). They were meeting the expectations set for them. If they all just sat around and did nothing then their professor would be disappointed and they'd all be bored.
It's not that everything about the study is fake, I'm sure the prisoners experienced actual levels of distress, but the finding that if take a person and lock them up they become deeply unhappy isn't actually shocking.
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I think there is a lot about DbD that is interesting from a psychological perspective.
The Us vs Them nature of the Survivors/Killer divide.
The fact that many of us talk about it as if our game experiences (killer dominant, survivor dominant, prominence of certain behaviors, etc.) is the standard for everyone and when confronted with the fact that others are having different experiences the reaction is disbelief and anger (kind of like egocentrism).
What circumstances cause a killer to give mercy.
What causes players to just give up.
That the game provides things that are clearly superior (Iri addons), but that frequently these aren't taken to be more fair.
That players can use offerings to either give themselves an advantage or more blood points. Frequently it is blood points. Is this for fairness purposes, or greed?
That the prior two statements seem to go out the window with an SWF.
The thing I find most interesting is how frequently survivors will risk going back for someone stranded on a hook. The game says you aren't a team. The BP reward is minimal and the risk is relatively high. Yet even with the door open it's pretty common to see survivors in a soloQ all work together to rescue their remaining 'teammate' (some form of impromptu altruism? De Toqueville's view on inherent group formations? Straightforward Empathy? The desire to "beat" the killer?).
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Are you saying this is one big BHVR experiment?
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lol. Sometimes it feels that way. The entity has always seemed to represent game development in an artistic expression sort of sense.
a ton of psychological observations go into game development these days. That’s how loot mechanics for example are developed.
then there are the survivors and killers. While seemingly arbitrary and above all the roles make common sense for gameplay elements - the choices initially presented in the original game model were notoriously open ended and allowed for better freedom of expression and execution it felt. Which in a lot of ways could have been preserved as data in regards to human behavior.
i mean the company is called “BEHAVIOR” after all.
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Ahhhh.
gotcha. So basically it was data that wasn’t properly recorded and modeled in terms of modern experiment design.
i think one thing to also account for is how humans behave is based on cultural influences as well. And with the example given it would also be fair to say that the study group of a bygone era is very different from a modern control group and experimental group. Some people may even be trying to influence the current data to oppose the previous outcome to prove a point - though that gets into conspiracy theory territory.
Human experiments are very taboo now. So I would argue that the truth is buried in the past and we should still use it as a stepping stone if for nothing else the argument that continued research will always benefit the long term as the world is forever changing.
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