General Discussion

General DiscussionValve psycological warfare by cognitive dissonance!

Valve psycological warfare by cognitive dissonance! in General Discussion
Sir

    At the end of a Dota match you have a survey that comes up. It used to just be one question, like 'Rate the quality of the match, one to five stars.' And that was fine. We could correlate those responses to various in-game behaviors, and see what people were doing, and see what kinds of qualities of matches led to good behaviors and so forth. And that was fine.

    But what we changed a bit a little more recently was added a couple more questions. So we added, 'Please rate how cooperative your teammates were, one to five stars,' you know, not at all cooperative to very cooperative. We also added a third question, which was, 'Rate how cooperative you were as a teammate.' And this was the important one.

    I honestly don't care if you lie. All of us want to think highly of ourselves, so there's going to be a natural inclination to want to put, say, 'Hey, I was really cooperative as a teammate.'

    What's going to happen, though, is that if you rate yourself really highly as a teammate, 'Yeah, I'm a five-star teammate' but you weren't, because you know that you were being a dick in the game, you're going to go into what psychologists like to call cognitive dissonance. When you're holding two conflicting notions in mind, right? One, that you were actually a bad teammate, and two, that you rated yourself highly as a good teammate.

    You're going to want to answer the question honestly. You're going to want to actually rate yourself accurately as a good teammate, so the hope is that because you had this dissonance between how you want to rate yourself and how you actually behaved, it's going to push your behavior more towards wanting to be a more cooperative teammate.

    So we actually saw, once we put those questions in the game, is that the number of reports in-game went down by about 10 to 15 percent.

    XoD^

      And here i just marked 1 star without ever reading the questions ._.

      love for the a7be

        This is an old thread. Don't regurgitate old threads as your own please.

        XoD^

          ^It was posted 9 mins ago.. what are you talking about? ._.

          Lorne Malvo

            Not really cognitive dissonance though is it because you are not holding two opposing views.

            'Yeah, I'm a five-star teammate' but you weren't, because you know that you were being a dick in the game, you're going to go into what psychologists like to call cognitive dissonance. When you're holding two conflicting notions in mind, right? One, that you were actually a bad teammate, and two, that you rated yourself highly as a good teammate.'

            If you know you are being a dick then you probably wouldn't think you were a five star team mate since you know that these are mutually exclusive. This would be more Dunning Kruger.

            If you know that you were a bad team member but rated yourself higher then you are just lying to yourself. You would actually believe you were a fantastic team player and be too egotistical to even consider any other alternative.

            Rule of Dota 2: If your team wins it is mainly because you are awesome and carried your weaker team mates. If you lose then your team mates were just too bad for your awesome perfection to counteract.

            Anyhow maybe it is just a semantic distinction. Interesting topic though.

            Sir

              in order to know how good you are at something you would
              require exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place
              which means that if you're actually no good at something
              then you lack the skill to know that youre not good at it.

              Polkadot Piranha

                That's not entirely accurate - especially not in a computer game. I mean, I might KNOW exactly which order to execute the combo to melt the opposing players as a 6 slotted tinker, however, my old man fingers might not be oiled and in agreement with my brain to a degree that will actually result in the aforementioned melting of opposing players. This may or may not be followed up by "Sorry guys, I really suck at this hero."

                BenaoLifedancer

                  it is indeed old

                  epsik-kun

                    lol