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different computer gave less positive responses. Given that these college students were all familiar with computers, they did not consciously believe that computers had feelings. Instead, as Reeves and Nass argue, users rely on existing social norms when interacting with new technology. And we do this because our brains lack the cognitive resources to create and follow entirely new social protocols for every novel class of technology we encounter. When a computer asks us to evaluate its cooking (so to speak), we subconsciously treat it as if it were a person asking us, and the politeness rule is triggered. Without even being aware of it, we treat computers as if they had feelings and could be hurt emotionally by our remarks. 5
    As another example of how we fall back on existing social norms even in new technological spaces, consider the notion of personal space in virtual worlds. In the physical world, the amount of personalspace we give another person depends a lot on whom we’re talking to and what we’re talking about. Intimacy, for example, can be expressed either with eye contact or by moving closer to another person. When one of these cues is accidentally triggered, such as when we are crammed next to strangers in an elevator, we modulate the other cue to maintain the appropriate level of intimacy. Thus, in an elevator, we turn away from and avoid eye contact with the people next to us to defuse the cues of uncomfortable intimacy. In a study my colleagues and I conducted in
Second Life,
a virtual world in which users can create their own content, we wondered whether people moving around with the mouse and keyboard in digital avatars would nevertheless conform to these physical norms. And it turned out that this modulation of eye contact and personal space indeed occurs in
Second Life;
people standing close to each other in
Second Life
are less likely to be looking directly at the other person. Instead of developing new social norms, we fall back on the ones we’ve learned from the physical world. 6
    The same is true for superstitions. False contingencies trigger superstitious behaviors around highly desirable rewards, whether we’re talking about pigeons in Skinner boxes or people in online games. For pigeons, this is food pellets. For online gamers, the rewards are magical items, rare monster spawns, or over-enchanting equipment. When a superstitious idea emerges, it can be inadvertently reinforced, and then social dynamics such as low relative cost help it spread across a community. And once a superstitious ritual spreads, it takes on a life of its own, and not even the direct refutation by game developers can quash the superstition.
    Our digital bodies are fluid, mutable with the click of the mouse. Our fantasy worlds, with their elven druids and galactic starships,seem far removed from the physical world and infinitely malleable. But the reality is quite strange and sobering. Even if virtual worlds were tabula rasa, we are encumbered with a great deal of cognitive baggage. Our brains are hardwired with many mental shortcuts to help us make sense of the world. We simply do not have the time to carefully process every piece of information that comes our way. To cope with this inundation of information, our brains have developed automated heuristics that filter and preprocess this information for us. Thus, when we encounter new media and technological devices, we fall back on the existing rules and norms we know. We react to computers as if they were human and had feelings. And when we enter virtual worlds, this mental baggage hitches a ride with us. We react to digital bodies the way we react to physical bodies. And the same psychological triggers that lead to superstitions in Skinner’s pigeons lead us to develop superstitions in online games. This is an example of the Proteus Paradox: how our brains work doesn’t change when we slip into a digital body. In a fully digital technological