Financial Times
January 3, 2013
I am flying. No plane, no wings, just me soaring over rooftops with a mild flip in my belly as I dip closer to the grid of city streets. I lean to the right to curve past a skyscraper, then speed up and tilt left to skirt by a tree. There has been an earthquake and I am looking for a lost child who is diabetic and needs insulin.
This is not a dream. I am awake, wearing my normal clothes – no cape or leotard – standing squarely on both feet in a room of the virtual reality laboratory at Stanford University.
About 70 test subjects have done the same simulation, half of them flying in a virtual helicopter, the other half granted the virtual superpower of flight. Half from each group have a mission: find and save the lost child.
After the simulation, head gear returned to a hook on the wall, a researcher reaches for her clipboard to ask a few questions. She accidentally knocks over a tin of pens. In sociology studies, this is a classic trick for measuring altruistic intent. The test subjects who flew Superman-style rushed to help clean up the spill. They responded four seconds faster and picked up two more pens on average than the helicopter passengers.
“If you are flying, you feel very powerful, so the sense of having power made people more generous, more altruistic,” says Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco who helped design the study, accepted for publication in the e-journal Plos One. “It could also be that the desire to be helpful was directly related to conscious or unconscious associations to Superman,” she adds.
Many new technologies begin with such virtuous goals of making the world a better place and its citizens better people. But many come with hidden costs that take time to surface. Now that mainstream internet sites such as Google, Facebook and Amazon are all in close reach with a few touches of the smartphone in your pocket, the human side-effects of being constantly connected are starting to emerge.
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