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I was listening to a podcast with Michael Bailey, an OG researcher on trans issues and a guy who was at the front-lines of the conflict 20 years ago, long before this was a mainstream flashpoint.
Bailey talked about the autogynephilia model of male-to-female transexuals. I had heard some of it before: that many start off by having a fetish of being aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. But historically since doctors would not prescribe sex reassignment for a sex fetish, they could only claim that they "were really a girl inside." Even though m-t-f's like McCloskey hit every male brained stereotype.
But then Bailey went to say that over years of cross-dressing to get off on themselves, many create an identity for themselves as a woman, an identity which may come to seem like the "real" them. Hence the eventual desire to transition and really become this character.
This got me thinking that to extent that something like "gender identity" exists in the brain separable from biological sex, I think wonder if it is really the matter of an entire personal identity that gets molded and created over time.
Question: are there documented examples of this kind of thing happening outside of sex/gender? Like an actor who becomes so caught up in role he thinks that role is the "real" him.
(Perhaps some of us can feel this way, our psued life can feel more like the real us...)
[cw: probably an invasive meme, although not a particularly harmful one. Also, caveat: I don't think Bailey or Blanchard's model is particularly useful as an approach for the typical trans woman, even and in part because there are actual 'cis'-by-conventional-standards autogynophiles.]
There's a variety and range on these matters: actors taking method acting to extremes either falsely (no one cares about Leto) to more serious issues (Bowie didn't seem to handle his stage persona well at all), and multiples (don't ask) can range from wanting integration to actively being appalled by the concept. It's enough of an issue that there's a lot of psychological screening that goes on for serious undercover investigation roles. TvTropes (cw: tvtropes) has a pretty good list of some real-life examples at the bottom of this page, mostly focused on actors.
((Though not everyone seems vulnerable: Norah Vincent's later suicide is probably unrelated to her time living as a man, but even when she liked the social aspects she never really seemed to change self-identity.))
Fictional tulpa or tulpa-likes that take over their creator is a popular target of media, but actual people who've made one and complain about it tend to be more frustrated just that they can't get it to shut up (and arguably some impact on performance in some testing scenarios?) rather than it becoming the new 'real' personality.
((Furries and some non-furries that spend too much time in VR have reported weird results. Some therianthropes claimed to get similar fake-tactile feedback with sufficient meditation in a pre-VR environment, but it's... hard to find good documentation now. And impacts on personality from an avatar are pretty well-documented well outside of VR, although insert necessary caveats about social science research, even if I've been more impressed by Nick Yee than most social scientists.))
Outside of the more out-there therians and actors, though, this can be hard to notice from the outside, and harder still to distinguish from normal personality changes from simply being in these environments. It's weird if you wanted to have your last name legally changed to match your wrestling stage name or fursona, but unless you also get in a shootout with cops or pick a name the courts don't like, it's probably not going to make the news.
And if it's not changing your name or gender (or phenotype), it might even be part of the intent going in! There's a lot of people who go into VR with the intent of getting more used to meatspace interactions, and it's hard to tell the difference between being more social because you've gotten the practice, and being more social because that's what your avatar would do. If gatt the nardodragon likes pranks more than I do, or gry the Hrothgar is just generally cheerful, it might even be hard for me internally to notice if I’m more them one day. Even if I present mannerisms that are solely artifacts of those game's designers or animators, there’s mirror neuron reasons it could happen just as a matter of course rather than some deep identity matters.
Is there even a difference? A new behaviour is established, gets positive reinforcement, grows.
Yes, few people have the ability to keep their inner life unchanged when they get a lot of reinforcement in a different direction. And describing it like that, I think its easy to see how having that ability would put you at risk for a different kind of insanity.
Google is useless here, mind elaborating?
At the boring level, people do seem to behave differently based on their avatar, specifically, even when not self-selected. Again, caveat social science research (it's a little hilarious in retrospect how much effort went to eliminating priming as a potential confounder) or anecdote, but Nick Yee's research does try to poke at this and some other alternatives. And anecdotally, I have picked up mannerisms or habits of speech I never used, but the game's animators and designers (or even third-party modders) did -- that's not quite the same thing when I wasn't really pretending to be the character so much as controlling them outside of cutscenes, but it seems like that could be close enough.
At the intermediate level, it's very easy for a character to 'get away' from you, either because of ramifications from other characterization or limitations of a format or type. You might try behaviors you'd normally never consider in those same environments, simply because it's the 'right' or 'in-character' thing. (Or maybe the character just always looks kinda goofy.)
Closer to the central claim, though, I think there is some difference between, for example, playing a character that is foo and doing foo, for wide varieties of characteristics. The latter probably is better at encouraging that specific action! But the former makes you think about the broader characteristics and motivations and how all those things would interact. Which, to be fair, is still a new behavior that's established and getting reinforcement. Just a different one.
Ah, sorry. Multiplicity/plurality is a broad category of self-identification. I don't know the topic particularly well enough to go into detail, and there's a lot of taboo words that may reflect either philosophical positions or community battles that aren't particularly obvious to outsiders: the internal phrasing is usually some variant of multiple people in one body. This seems to be one of the more popular descriptions for outsiders that I've been pointed to, though I don't know how well-regarded it is in general, or to what extent everyone covered by this definition would self-identity (eg, most LessWrong tulpamancers don't self-identity as plural).
MineCraft Quilt is a modloader that forked/derived from a different one for a variety of reasons (link is a lot of unnecessary background info), but while most were long-lasting technical problems, a big triggering incident was about as Culture War as it could get, which meant that most of the founding generation for Quilt either had very strong feelings about dependency correction or were very specifically pro-trans.
Add in some evaporative cooling, and you get a very Blue Tribe community. But there's a lot of subcultures in the Blue Tribe, including some things that weren't well-known even among a lot of fairly strongly left-leaning people to start with. One of the matters that was both very visible (in part because of a couple serious code contributors) and didn't readily slot into widerspread community norms was multiplicity/plurality. (And not just in the funny ways like inviting a bunch of debates over the singular 'they'.)
These were not specific to (or even particularly well-known before within) the MineCraft or modded MineCraft community. There's been some livejournal and dreamwidth communities from these people dating back to the late 00s, to my knowledge -- I'd seen them on the edges of the therian/otherkin communities for a while then. Quilt's just one of the first places I've seen where a) it was taken as a rule that it needed to be honored, to the point of having integrated Discord tools to assist, and b) interacted with people that were majority not-plural, plural-curious, or in a weird adjacent community (eg therians, otherkin, people building tulpas).
As I understand it, this would be in effect only while you wear the avatar. I interpreted the sentence I responded to
as being about long-term effects. The short-term effects are interesting, but I dont see how they would lead to the character taking over in the off-time.
I somewhat agree, depending on what you imagine for "just doing foo". If you get told what to do over earbuds, thats less dangerous than "playing a character" normally. I would say this is because in the latter case youre figuring out what to do, and that way of figuring out can be reinforced. I dont think its essential for that figuring out to involve thinking about some character.
And I think this is essentially the same way normal behaviour changes in an environment: You go in with somewhat different mood/disposition each day, and some of them get more positive reinforcement than others.
BTW, I think often doing a specific action is not the best way of encouraging it. Many actions lie at a point within the decision tree that youd never normally get to, and training that last step more wont help.
There's been some research to check for transfer to offline environments (eg here or, while less directly tied to the avatar, 'game transfer phenomena discussions of behaviors and habits do seem close). I think the science tends to be weaker, especially garden of forking paths problems, and they tend to only measure on scales of days rather than months or years, but it does match my experiences.
Now, these are usually small and fairly trivial things, and sometimes not even matters you'd consider character (or, conversely, are Character in the Calvin's Dad sense), so it's fair to say there's still a long way from the sort of mode changes that the OP was motioning around. But I think it's a quantitative rather than qualitative difference.
That's reasonable.
Well yes, if we believe in reinforcement or some other mechanism like that, that can carry the short-term consequences into the long term. But there the proteus effect is not an alternative way that the character can take over long term. All the stuff about the mechanism of it suggests it doesnt have an independent long-term effect.
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That's a name I haven't seen in a long time. It's a shame he pivoted his academic virtual social research into a gaming market research firm. The rest of the Terra Nova writers had less interesting content over the years. I think Castronova has been flogging the same virtual economics concept unchanged for something like 20 years now.
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@gattsuru, please correct me if I’m missing something.
Quilt is a fork of Fabric, one of the main modding tools for Minecraft. It split in part because of drama involving ”plurality,” or multiple personalities in one body. The issue was not so much that concept as it was the moderation response to criticism, but I’m less clear on the specifics.
I think plurality/multiplicity/headmates pushes the boundaries of “new behavior.” Or rather—it is adequately described from the outside as an adopted behavior, but proponents will fight tooth and nail to tell you that’s not the case. That their personalities have distinct values and goals, and must not be treated as an affectation. They may benefit from social accommodations such as xenopronouns or discord bots.
One thing led to another, and Quilt seceded to make their own modloader, with blackjack and redesigned moderation. My understanding is that this involves a lot of workflow and API improvements, too, and is not just a political maneuver. In theory it’s the free (-open-source-software) market in action: if you don’t like the management, head out and make your own improvements.
In practice, critics view it as the continuation of politics by other means. Technical improvements made by Quilt are inseparable from its weirder stances. I have no idea how the cost-benefit works out for the broader Minecraft modding community.
I'd caveat that Quilt mostly split over more conventional trans-specific Culture War. If you want the exact background, here and here (cw: discussion of suicide) are the Quilt-favorable perspectives on the events, though I'll caution that they're a long and very inside-baseball read.
((Also some even more boring problems related to bikeshedding: literally a year of Fluid API attempts.))
The increasing recognition of multiplicity/plurality stuff seems to have been a downstream effect of evaporative cooling and a few of the early Quilt coders (I think gdude? and silver?) being plural or plural-adjacent, and having roles early on that made it easier to bring up or turn into community rules or norms. But afaik the whole thing was little more than a curiosity for Fabric even early into the split.
In the end, both Quilt and Fabric are a bit of a rounding error for total users: the biggest Quilt and Fabric mods gets tiny download counts, and those are often straight clones or ports of their Forge equivalents. There's interesting stuff happening in places, but they're more for the programmer and friends than a general category of users.
There's a not-implausible argument that they've encouraged better behavior from LexManos and Forge -- at the very least, Forge is a lot more willing to work with people now than in the 1.7-1.12 era, especially for ASM/mixins -- but at the same time the increasingly fractured community makes it hard to work or onboard newcomers. I've got hopes that Quilt may try to solve a few dependency problems (mostly resolution, but also a variant of the diamond problem) that wouldn't be possible for Forge to force or practical for Fabric's design team, but it hasn't really done that yet.
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