Since the dawn of the internet, there have been debates about whether we reflect a different side of ourselves online than we do in the physical world.  New research from Ghent University suggests the two versions of ourselves might be more similar than was previously thought.

The researchers highlight how people have been connecting via multiplayer online games since the early 90s, but it has still been somewhat unclear whether the behaviors exhibited in these games reflect those seen in real life.  The researchers tested their question out via the EVE Online game, which has around 500,000 players fighting, trading, and collaborating in a futuristic galaxy.

The researchers were particularly keen to monitor the social and economic interactions between players in the game, where they extract and process the raw materials available in the game and trade them widely, thus creating a virtual economy.

Measuring behavior

The researchers tracked trade activity data to understand how people behaved towards each other along a spectrum of friendliness or aggression.  They averaged the data by player country to compare in-game behavior with real-world data on the aggressiveness of a nation that was gathered from the Global Peace Index and Global Terrorist Index.  They also captured each country’s socio-economic characteristics (using the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER), and the Unemployment rate (UNEMP) from the World Bank).

The data showed that aggressiveness towards non-player (and non-human) characters in the game was linked to higher levels of aggressiveness in the home countries of the player.  Those same people were also, however, less likely to act aggressively towards fellow players than their peers from safer countries.

The data also revealed a correlation between the trading behavior of players in the game and their real-life location.  For instance, players from countries with high unemployment and weak currencies tended to trade more cautiously in the game.

Despite obvious limitations existing in the self-selection of players with a degree of income to spend on the game, and indeed on countries where sufficient numbers of players exist to make the experiment worthwhile, the researchers believe their findings are illustrative of how virtual behaviors bleed into the real world, and vice versa.

“The real-world environment impacts the behavior of players in online games,” they conclude. “Real-world aggression makes online players more friendly though.”