Skip to the main content
Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Reality

Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Reality

Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford

Monday, January 25, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor

RSVP required for those attending in person (kglemaud@cyber.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

This talk is part of The Psychology and Economics of Trust and Honesty speaker series, led by Berkman Fellow Judith Donath and hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Law Lab. For more related to Bailenson's talk, see this page.

From Jeremy:

In this talk, I describe a series of projects that explore the manners in which avatars (representations of people in virtual environments) qualitatively change the nature of remote communication. Unlike telephone conversations and videoconferences, avatars have the ability to systematically filter their physical appearance and behavioral actions in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real-time for strategic purposes. These transformations have a drastic impact on interactants' abilities to influence others in social and professional contexts.

About Jeremy

Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.

Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed. Furthermore, he designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.

His findings have been published in over 70 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, law, political science, and psychology. His work has been consistently funded by the National Science Foundation for over a decade, and he also receives grants from various Silicon Valley and international corporations. Bailenson consults regularly for government agencies including the Army, the Department of Defense, the National Research Council, and the National Institute of Health on policy issues surrounding virtual reality.

Links

Download media from this event here.

Past Event
Jan 25, 2010
Time
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM

You might also like


Events 05

Event
Jan 11, 2010 @ 12:30 PM

Brain Bases of Deception: Why We Probably Will Never Have a Perfect Lie Detector

Stephen M. Kosslyn, Dean of Social Science and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Associate Psychologist in the Department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital

Different brain systems are used when one produces lies in different ways, such as by fabricating lies spontaneously "on the fly" versus fabricating them on the basis of a…

Event
Apr 5, 2010 @ 12:30 PM

Old Habits Die Hard: Can Technology Change Deception?

Jeff Hancock, Cornell University

In this talk, Jeff will consider some of the myths commonly held about deception, and use the intersection of technology and deception to surface and rethink our assumptions about…

Mar 8, 2010 @ 12:30 PM

The hierarchy of virtue: mutualism, altruism, and signaling in Martu women’s cooperative hunting

Rebecca Bliege Bird, Stanford University

Rebecca Bliege Bird will discuss the question "Why do Martu women hunt cooperatively when they don't seem to benefit economically from doing so?" and suggests that demonstrating a…

Event
Feb 22, 2010 @ 12:30 PM

Whither Blind Justice? Effects of Physiognomy on Judicial Decisions

Leslie Zebrowitz, Brandeis University

Research shows that peoples’ facial appearance influences impressions of their honesty and judgments of their culpability, effects that have been shown to bias decisions in the…

Event
Feb 8, 2010 @ 12:30 PM

Signaling Theory and the Evolution of Religion

Richard Sosis, director of the Evolution, Cognition, and Culture Program at the University of Connecticut

Researchers from diverse disciplines have suggested that rituals and other religious behaviors serve as signals of an individual's commitment to a religious group, and some have…


Projects & Tools 01

Past

Law Lab

The Law Lab is a multidisciplinary research initiative and collaborative network of University, nonprofit and industry partners. Its mission is to investigate and harness the…