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An Investigation Into the Effects of Social Influence on Moral Behaviour Using Immersive Virtual Reality

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An Investigation Into the Effects of Social Influence on Moral Behaviour Using Immersive Virtual Reality An Investigation into the Effects of Social Influence on Moral Behaviour using Immersive Virtual Reality Jacob Thomas Thorn Thesis submitted to University College London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Computer Science University College London 06/01/2020 1 I, Jacob Thomas Thorn, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the work. ______________________________ ______________________________ 2 Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my supervisor Mel Slater, most of all for his trust over the last three and a half years, but also for his constant guidance and help in all aspects of this thesis and the PhD as a whole. I would also like to thank David Swapp for his additional support, whether he was piloting my next experiment, helping me with any technical issues in the HMD lab or providing otherwise invaluable advice. I would also like to thank my company supervisor, Pablo Bermell-Garcia, for supporting this project so wholeheartedly. I also want to thank my family and friends at UCL. To my wife Zhou for being so supportive for the entire PhD, my parents for providing extra support in the final few months and to Ben, David, Drew, Maria and Sebastian for their friendship over the last three and a half years. Lastly, I would like to thank all of the voice actors who provided their voices for the characters in my experiments: Alex and Sophie Burr, Ian Giblet, Mark Hall, Olivia Slater-Sanchez, Jared and Hope Somerville, Stephen Thorn and Luke Woodford. I also have an anti-acknowledgement for my one year old son William, without whom this thesis would have been completed much sooner, but who I am glad is here to see the completion of it. 3 Abstract Much of the research surrounding social influence investigates its effects in specifically non-moral situations while almost no research has looked at its effects during moral emergencies. At the same time, studies of moral psychology tend to focus on the intricacies of moral decision-making during the responses of individual participants. This thesis aims to bridge this gap between social influence and moral psychology by having participants respond to moral dilemmas while under the duress of social influence. In order to investigate the effects of social influence on moral behaviours, immersive virtual reality (IVR) was used, allowing participants to be placed in a life-like virtual simulation of events that they would normally only read about in a text-based vignette, probing their observed moral behaviours instead of just their abstract moral judgments. The benefits of using IVR include the ethical and controllable nature of questionnaires along with the verisimilitude of real-life. Another focus of this thesis is to compare moral judgments to moral behaviours. In two out of the three studies presented in this thesis, the virtual moral dilemma was replicated in a text-based questionnaire in order to compare the results from the two media. Moral judgments in response to text-based moral dilemma can miss out key contextual information such the motoric feedback of having to physically act out a movement. These factors can lead to a divergence between moral judgments and behaviours. The thesis starts with a literature review on IVR technology and moral decision-making and social influence research. After this, the three studies conducted as part of this thesis are described. The major findings from these studies include the demonstration of a preference to take action regardless of outcome only when in IVR and the inability for compliance attempts to influence specifically moral behaviour. 4 Impact Statement Perhaps the most impactful outcome of this thesis is the finding that participants may have a preference for action in moral dilemma presented in immersive virtual reality (IVR) compared to identical questionnaire descriptions. Previous results found that participants had a preference for utilitarianism in IVR (a response that is intimately coupled with taking an action) compared to questionnaire results and posited that this outcome was related to the saliency of the outcomes of the moral dilemma, i.e., the sensory confirmation that people will die unless an action, no matter how grisly it might be, is taken (Francis et al., 2016; Francis et al., 2017; McDonald, Defever, & Navarrete, 2017). The current result potentially explains these findings by showing that, instead of a preference for utilitarianism, participants may simply have had a preference to act, where the alternative was to do nothing. However, it disagrees with the proposed hypothesis for these results which implicated salient outcomes, where the current results seem to indicate that it is the saliency of actions that contributes to our moral behaviours. In order to more clearly understand the contribution of salient actions and outcomes to our moral decision-making, as well as any potential preferences for utilitarianism or taking action in IVR, a study should be run that decouples utilitarianism and having to take an action into separate conditions, something previously done by Conway and Gawronski (2013) and Gawronski, Conway, Armstrong, Friesdorf, and Hütter (2016). Another impactful result showed that participants did not adhere to a compliance request regarding and when responding to a moral dilemma and were similarly less likely to adhere when responding to a moral compared to a non-moral dilemma. This is counter to many previous studies that showed the willingness of people to alter their moral dispositions when faced with a consensus opinion, even when that opinion is very uncommon (Bostyn & Roets, 2017; Kelly, Ngo, 5 Chituc, Huettel, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2017; Kundu & Cummins, 2013; Lisciandra, Postma- Nilsenová, & Colombo, 2013). The potential reason for this might be the form of medium used to elicit moral decision-making, where, for example, participants have the option to lie in response to a moral judgment task, e.g., when responding to a questionnaire, but not during a task requiring real actions. Other differences such as the saliency of the scenario might also impact this interaction. Both the difference between the preference to take an action and the efficacy of social influence in IVR representations of moral dilemmas compared to textual vignettes in this thesis shows the necessity for future moral decision-making studies to make use of current technology, such as IVR, to present participants with more realistic representations of moral dilemmas. 6 Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4 Impact Statement………………………………………………………………………………………... 5 List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………………… 12 List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………………. 14 Chapter 1 – Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….. 15 1.1 Research Problem . 16 1.2 Research Questions . 18 1.3 Scope . 21 1.4 Contributions . 23 1.5 Structure . 24 Chapter 2 – Background……………………………………………………………………………….. 26 2.1 Immersive Virtual Reality . 26 2.1.1 IVR in Social Psychology . 27 2.1.2 Technology . 31 2.1.3 Presence . 34 2.2 Morality . 40 2.2.1 Evolution of Morality . 40 7 2.2.2 Moral Philosophy . 43 2.2.3 The Trolley Problem . 47 2.2.4 Moral Psychology . 63 2.2.5 Moral Neuroscience . 73 2.2.6 Moral Action . 81 2.3 Social Influence . 87 2.3.1 Models of Social Influence . 88 2.3.2 Compliance and Persuasion . 92 2.3.3 Social Cognitive Processes . 97 2.3.4 Moral Influence . 99 2.3.5 Virtual Influence . 103 2.4 Chapter Summary . 108 Chapter 3 – Methods…………………………………………………………………………………. 111 3.1 Moral Dilemmas . 111 3.2 Virtual Environments . 112 3.2.1 Embodiment . 113 3.2.2 Virtual Characters . 116 3.2.3 Virtual Conversation . 118 3.3 Equipment . 118 3.4 Participants . 119 3.5 Procedures . 120 Chapter 4 – Moral Judgment Versus Moral Behaviour……………………………………………. 125 4.1 Introduction . 126 8 4.2 Methods . 129 4.2.1 Scenario . 129 4.2.2 Experimental Design . 130 4.2.3 Participants . 131 4.2.4. Equipment . 131 4.2.5 Procedures . 132 4.2.6 Response Variables . 133 4.3 Results . 134 4.3.1 Presence Data . 134 4.3.2 Response Data . 136 4.4 Discussion . 139 4.5 Conclusion . 141 Chapter 5 – Social Influence and Omission Bias on Moral Behaviour………………………….... 143 5.1 Introduction . 144 5.2 Study One – Methods . 148 5.2.1 Scenario . 148 5.2.2 Experimental Design . 149 5.2.3 Participants . 150 5.2.4 Equipment . 150 5.2.5 Procedures . 151 5.2.6 Response Variables . 153 5.3 Study One – Results . 153 5.3.1 Presence Data . 153 9 5.3.2 Behavioural Data . 155 5.4 Study Two – Methods . 158 5.4.1 Experimental Design . 158 5.4.2 Participants . 158 5.4.3 Procedures . 159 5.4.4 Response Variables . 159 5.5 Study Two – Results . 159 5.6 General Discussion . 161 5.6.1 Social Influence . 161 5.6.2 Omission Bias . 164 5.6.3 Moral Judgment and Behaviour . 166 5.7 Conclusion . 168 Chapter 6 – Social Influence During Moral and Non-Moral Dilemmas…………………………… 169 6.1 Introduction . 169 6.1.1 Background . 169 6.1.2 Present Research . 171 6.1.3 Predictions . 173 6.2 Methods . 175 6.2.1 Experimental Design . 175 6.2.2 Participants . 176 6.2.3 Equipment . 177 6.2.4 Procedures . 177 6.2.5 Response Variables . 179 10 6.3 Results . 179 6.3.1 Presence Data . 180 6.3.2 Behavioural Data . 185 6.4 Discussion . 189 6.5 Conclusion . 191 Chapter 7 – Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………... 192 7.1 Moral Judgment versus Behaviour Experiment . 193 7.2 Social Influence and Omission Bias Experiment . 194 7.3 Moral versus Non-Moral Experiment . 196 7.4 Contributions . 196 7.4.1 Methodological Contributions . 196 7.4.2 Substantive Contributions . 199 7.5 Future Work .
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