Using Zimbardo’s ‘Psychology of Evil’ to Combat Harassment in Social VR
By: Lance G Powell Jr
Tags: Harassment, Psychology, Virtual Reality, Evil, VR

Using Zimbardo’s ‘Psychology of Evil’ to Combat Harassment in Social VR

As with all social contexts, social VR platforms have not been immune to disreputable behavior.

Over the past roughly two years, there’s been much public chatter on the toxic state of the internet, where taking a contentious political stance can nearly guarantee an outpouring of hate speech and a virtual tar-and-feathering. Among this polarized discourse, it’s been observed that some malignant actors without any overtly political motive delight in sowing hurt and chaos within online communities through sharing their most repugnant violations of social norms.

As with all social contexts, social VR platforms have not been immune to this disreputable behavior. But harassment in these virtual spaces is less similar to online, text-based harassment and closer to a generalized form of “street harassment” in which one person will chose to harass a stranger in public based on some cue (i.e. gender, race, height, style of dress) or due to a random impulse to stir up trouble.

Throughout this year as part of my graduate studies, I’m researching harassment within social VR and considering added methods for preventing it. In my reading, I recently came across a guideline out of psychology that social VR community members might use to stifle harassment within virtual environments by making them aware of their responsibility towards other community members. This is called the Seven Social Processes that Grease the Slippery Slope of Evil and can be read in “The Lucifer Effect” by Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo (of Stanford Prison Experiment fame). The processes were discussed in the context of Nazism, the Milgram experiments, and later Abu Ghraib prison, but there is enough crossover to warrant discussion here. They are as follows:

Mindlessly Taking the First Small Step

Dehumanization of Others

De-individuation of Self (anonymity)

Diffusion of Personal Responsibility

Blind Obedience to Authority

Uncritical Conformity to Group Norms

Passive Tolerance of Evil through Inaction or Indifference

The first small step in the context of the Holocaust might have been boycotting Jewish owned businesses while in The Milgram Experiment it was administering that first very minor electric shock. In social VR, this step is most likely allowing yourself to laugh at the antics someone harassing another user. Consciously or not, laughing or giving small verbal cues of enjoyment are taken as a sign of crowd approval, which emboldens the harasser to continue or even intensify their verbal assault. Moreover, if multiple people are laughing and adding commentary in support of the main offender, it will lead to a perceived Group Norm and this will further decrease the likelihood of outside intervention.

In the context of social VR, the Dehumanization of Others and De-individuation of Self provide the key ingredients of this wretched cocktail since, as an abstracted humanoid, or even mechanoid, avatar, other inhabitants of the virtual environment do not appear to be literally human. Likewise, harassers have the benefit of inhabiting a forms unlike themselves but bears some similarity to the other avatars, and they also have an alias that’s only discoverable by the administrators of the VR platform. While the effect of an avatar’s realism on user behavior is a topic of ongoing research and debate, the anonymous habitation of non-(photorealistic)-human forms does allow for a solipsistic vantage point in which verbal exchanges are unfettered by laws of decency and the feelings of an audience or target of harassment are entirely non-existent.