Another Reason for Real Names on Badges?

[kevin_standlee]

At the risk of starting *ahem* a flame war, I would like to point to an article about what is formally being called "online disinhibition effect," which is how people are apt to say things with less restraint online than they would in person. (And my thanks to Cheryl for pointing me at it.) In short, people flame more often online than they do in person.

Now I personally think this is more common when the person doing the flaming is behind a pseudonym. (By which I mean that nobody reading what you write knows who you are in real life; this is not the same thing as someone who has an odd handle but puts his/her name in his profile -- the rough equivalent if printing someone's real name under their fan name on a membership badge.) I sign my own name to these posts, so just possibly I'm showing a bit more restraint.

I was particularly interested in this extract:

...In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.

Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.

It occurs to me that there are a series of typically fannish behaviors that fall into this same description, characterized by an utter lack of ability to read emotional cues and emotional signs. Does this really mean that science fiction fans need to have their heads examined?

Comments

[julesjones]

But it does get into the "prove you're you" problem when people demand photo ID for a use name that is not the same as that on your legal ID -- which I've encountered when paying on the door, not just as security on pickup of pre-reg. Pity the name on my photo ID is the one nobody in fandom can remember even when they know what it is (as in, some of my closest friends can't remember it, including the one who has the same surname...).

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

But it does get into the "prove you're you" problem when people demand photo ID for a use name that is not the same as that on your legal ID -- which I've encountered when paying on the door, not just as security on pickup of pre-reg.

Believe it or not, given my desire for people to have a name on their badge by which they are known within the community and to which they will answer, I'm sympathetic with you. I don't know why someone should need to provide photo ID for a membership purchased on the door for cash. I've never heard a convention provide a reasonable justification for doing so. I've concluded that we have a lot of people for whom Your Papers Please is a Way Of Life.

[julesjones]

The trouble is, people interpret "real name" as "legal name, as shown on your real world photo ID". And then insist on putting that on the front of the badge, along with the "badge name". Now, I have no problem with putting the legal name on the *back* of the badge and insisting that the front of the badge include a name you are commonly known by in fandom, but I'm not happy with the insistence on publicly associating both names. A badge with a membership number prominently displayed is enough to identify someone who's being enough of a problem that it's necessary to find out what their legal name is.