A recent study by Weibel, Wissmath and Mast (2010)1 examines the Big Five personality correlates of immersion in virtual environments, finding that high Openness to Experience, Neuroticism, and Extraversion are positively related to the tendency to be immersed.
Immersion is not very clearly defined in the article, so we’ll have to assume they’re using the layman’s definition – that feeling you get where the outside world fades away and your entire attention is on the game/virtual environment. This seems related to the concepts of engagement in business research and flow in psychology, although this paper makes no attempt to pull in either.
The results here are somewhat atheoretical, as there was no a priori attempt to link personality traits to specific characteristics related to immersion. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a brute force empirical approach, but it does change the sorts of conclusions that can be made. This work found that all three personality traits were related to emotional involvement (one dimension of immersion) while only Openness was related to absorption (the other dimension). Neuroticsm was also the most strongly related to emotional involvement of the three. But the specific reasons for these variables to correlate in this way (i.e. Why are neurotic people more likely to be immersed?”) are unclear.
There are certainly limitations. The research was conducted entirely via survey with a 21% response rate. Immersion is studied here as immersive tendency, a personality trait with items like, “How frequently do you find yourself closely identifying with the characters in a story line?” While the authors make a claim that this is related to immersion in “mediated environments,” it’s not clear if such general immersive tendencies would translate into actual differences in behavior, and furthermore if immersive tendencies in technology-mediated environments could be measured with items like the example given above. The low response rate also raises some concern about missingness, although the severity of this problem depends on why people were missing.
Still, the implications are interesting. If these three personality traits are related to tendencies toward immersion, and if this generalized to immersion in virtual environments, it opens up the possibility we can predict engagement level in technology-mediated training programs from personality, which would potentially affect how much trainees learned from those environments, holding all other features constant. For example, I might hypothesize from this that people high in Openness would be more engaged in a training program held in Second Life rather than in person, and would as a result experience better learning outcomes from the Second Life training program.
- Weibel, D., Wissmath, B., & Mast, F. W. (2010). Immersion in mediated environments: The role of personality traits. Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 13, 251-256 : 10.1089/cyber.2009.0171 [↩]
A very interesting article from the Journal of Organizational Behavior1 suggests that genetics play a role in predicting if you’ll respond to surveys. Over 1000 twin pairs were contacted through the Minnesota Twin Registry, and it was found that 45% of the variance in survey response behavior could be explained by genetic differences.
For those unfamiliar with the Minnesota Twin Family Study, here’s the brief version: Tom Bouchard in 1979 began studying a pair of twins that had been separated at birth and reunited at age 39. He believed that by examining twins (similar genetic profiles but different experiences), we could better address the psychological problem of nature vs. nurture: do genetics or environment play a stronger role in actual behavior. This eventually evolved into several projects, including the Minnesota Study of Identical Twins Reared Apart, which examined twin pairs with identical genomes but often quite different experiences growing up. The Minnesota Twin Registry in particular is an extension of this project, and contains many thousand twin pairs of native Minnesotans born 1936-1955 and 1961-1964. Some are identical; some, fraternal.
Thompson, Zhang, and Arvey (2010) used this registry to examine the genetic determinants of non-response bias. They essentially asked the question, “When we send out a survey, who responds?” and if patterns of non-response are random or instead might bias results systematically. In survey research, we must explicitly consider the reason that data is missing. There are several possibilities:
- MCAR (Missing Completely At Random): Ahh, the safety of MCAR. When missingness is MCAR, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Missingness is uncorrelated with anything else, so missing data will not bias your results.
- MAR (Missing At Random): When data is MAR, you only have a little to worry about. Data is not MCAR, but it is not missing in a way that will bias your results. For example, let’s assume that you send your survey invitations via e-mail to a random sample of your population of interest, with a deadline of 1 week for participation. Perhaps the construct Comfort with Computers predicts how often people check their e-mail – some of your sample simply won’t check their e-mail within a week and as a result, their data will be missing. But as long as Comfort with Computers (or a construct correlated with Comfort with Computers) isn’t what you’re interested in measuring, your results will be safe.
- NMAR (Not Missing At Random): When data is NMAR, you have a problem. Missing data will bias your results systematically due to range restriction. Consider the example above, but this time, the target of your survey is measurement of Comfort with Computers. If people with low Comfort with Computers don’t respond, then missingness will result in range restriction, which will in turn artificially decrease the magnitude of any correlations you might compute on it.
The problem with understanding missingness, of course, is that there is no way to actually track it. MCAR/MAR/NMAR is a theoretical concept, and one that must be considered during the survey development process. But it cannot be measured in most surveys; if people didn’t respond, there’s no easy way to discover their reason.
Thompson, Zhang and Arvey were able to investigate this because of a unique advantage; they already had access to genetic information before sending the survey out. By comparing people with predictable genetic differences (or even identical genes) raised in different households, they were able to extract the proportion of variability in survey responses predictable from differences in genetics. The value? 45% (a correlation of .67). Likelihood of survey response (at least to a leadership survey) seems to be substantially heritable.
The implication of this? There is at least some biological basis for non-response to surveys. This means that the MCAR/MAR/NMAR distinction must be made even more carefully, as any characteristic with a genetic basis (and there are many) might be correlated with non-response, biasing the results from any survey on those characteristics.
- Thompson, L., Zhang, Z., & Arvey, R. (2010). Genetic underpinnings of survey response. Journal of Organizational Behavior, DOI: 10.1002/job.692 [↩]
2012 Edit: Apparently AddToAny has been sold to a company called Lockerz, which has added additional tracking that is not stopped by the method described below. The easiest solution to this problem remains to uninstall AddToAny. But if you want to keep it anyway, you can get rid of Lockerz (and much other tracking software), with the WordPress plugin, WP DoNotTrack.
I occasionally talk here about privacy concerns, usually with an emphasis on protecting privacy, so imagine my surprise when I discovered this blog was without my knowledge using behavioral marketing – a targeted advertising tracking mechanism was embedded within! This has since been repaired. So that the same doesn’t happen to you, I thought it would be useful to share my experience combating this menace. If you don’t run a blog, you can safely skip this one.
To give you some background, this blog operates the wordpress.org blogging platform. One of the advantages of wordpress.org is the degree of customization that is possible with it – you can download any of over 10,000 free plugins to provide additional functionality. For example, the social networking links on the top right are from a plugin called the Subscribe Sidebar, while the Facebook “like” button is added by April’s Facebook Like Button.
Up until yesterday, I also used the vanilla version of a plugin called AddToAny to create that nice big friendly Share button at the bottom of each post, to make it easier for you to post articles to whatever social network you might want to post them to. There are a few other options to do this (like Sociable), but I found AddToAny to be the most versatile. Unfortunately, it came with a hidden price – automatic enrollment into a behavioral marketing system called media6degrees.
I discovered this through the use of a Firefox add-on called TACO: Targeting Advertising Cookie Opt-Out, which gives users control to opt-out out of such marketing regardless of what web authors’ intentions are. Imagine my surprise when I got behavioral marketing warnings on my own website!
TACO alone didn’t tell me what was causing the marketing calls home – just that media6degrees was the website being called. A quick Google search later led me to a very informative post. Here’s the short version:
And what’s media6degrees business you ask? Maybe they’re just providing the add-to-any author with statistics? Well, not exactly. This is what media6degrees writes on their website: “We deliver scalable custom audiences to major marketers by utilizing the online connections of their consumers.” So by using AddToAny, you’re providing media6degrees with data about your site’s visitors, which they can use to sell targeted communication to their customers.
If a company wants to use this kind of marketing to turn a profit, that’s certainly fine with me, but they need to be upfront about it. I shouldn’t discover that I have adopted another company’s marketing platform through a 3rd-party program – it should be either a clear and straightforward setup option or an opt-in program.
Fortunately, the fix was easy, although unintuitive and mysteriously unmentioned on the AddToAny customization list. Here are the instructions:
- Open the AddToAny Settings menu (found under Plugins)
- Scroll down to the textbox labeled Additional Options
- Add the following text:
var a2a_config = a2a_config || {};
a2a_config.no_3p = 1;
According to futtta’s blog, this will opt you out of current and all future tracking initiated through AddToAny. Success! If I hadn’t been able to get rid of this tracking, I would’ve dropped AddToAny in a heartbeat.
In the interest of full disclosure, I want to make clear that I do track user access through Google Analytics. I do this to see how popular different posts are more accurately than is possible with WordPress’ built-in tracking. This means I get more information on what’s resonating with you, the readers. But this isn’t used to deliver marketing – it’s used to deliver better content.