What is Virtual Asch?
Virtual Asch is a project designed to comparing people's views of online vs. present-in-room humans regarding conformity. Hence, it works to answer questions similar to that of Solomon Asch's conformity study, except the subject will be interacting in a virtual environment.
What is Asch's Conformity Study?
In Asch's famous conformity experiment, a group of people are placed in a room and told they are subjects for a "vision test". Unbeknownst to one of the members of the group (the subject of the conformity experiment), all other group members are confederates for the experimenter.
The group is given a set of 3 lines, plus an additional line whose length is the "target length". The members must decide which one of the 3 lines in the set has the same length as the target length. All trials are purposefully unambiguous (the answers are clear and obvious). When each person gets a turn to speak their answer, they almost always answer correctly. But what happens when it's your turn to give the answer, but everyone in the room has given an obviously wrong answer to the question? Do you go against the group and announce what you see, or do you conform out of fear of being a fool (among other reasons)?
How does Virtual Asch build on the original experiment?
Virtual Asch wishes to compare the live experiment to those done in a simulated world. How do the percentages of conforming subjects compare when sitting in a real-life room vs. sitting in a virtual world? If one were to tell the subject that the other group members are "computers", does it change their conformity percentage? What if you tell the subject that the other group members are "respected researchers"?
Real humans cause subjects to conform a considerable percentage of the time; could virtual characters make people conform just as much? Furthermore: What happens when factors like race, sex, and age of group members are attributed? This question can be answered by the program's ability to load various actors with different ethnicities.
What are the technical aspects of Virtual Asch?
Virtual Asch is a simulation of a real-world environment facilitated by:
A 3D world powered by the Ogre rendering engine
Media
Watch a short technical video just demonstrating the virtual environment. Head-tracking is enabled, sans visual headmount:
[Watch video]