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Palo Alto, CA - Professors from the Stanford Department of Psychology
reported the discovery of a new personality disorder: Application-induced
Social Dysfunction.
Certain professions can warp the personality of people in those
professions. For example, teachers who speak to adults as if they
were students and police officers who treat family like criminals.
What researchers are now realizing is that a high degree of exposure
to certain software applications can cause similar dysfunctional
effects.
"We first became aware of ASD through a young man who came
to us in 2001 complaining about his roommate," said Professor
Geoff Turner, "His roommate would enter his bedroom and begin
talking. The two would converse normally. However, once the conversation
had clearly finished, his roommate would persist in the room, showing
no plan of leaving, and would have to be physically pushed out of
the room."
"Over the course of the next few weeks, we found other similar
behaviors. When shopping, he would often continue to stand in front
of the register in the checkout line for several minutes after he
had paid the cashier. We also saw at a party that he stayed long
after all other guests had left and the hosts clearly wished him
to leave."
"The breakthrough came for us when we were watching him use
his PC," said Turner. "At first we were looking to see
if the materials he was browsing online were perhaps having some
harmful effect, but we could find nothing obviously harmful. It was
when he clicked on the 'X' in the top right corner of the window
to close AOL that we saw it. The window did not close as you would
expect - instead, a further window popped up offering AOL's broadband
service. We saw the facial muscles twitch, the jaw clench, heard
the faint guttural sound of irritation - we knew we'd found our cause."
One clinical report in the study detailed the case of a 27-year-old
male, known only as ‘B’. "B converses intelligently
and is in clear possession of his motor skills," an extract
reads. "However, when performing simple tasks such as waiting
at a stop signal while driving, he is apt to fall silent and motionless
for a long time. Often the light will turn green and back to red
again with no visible motion on his part."
B puzzled us for the longest time," recalls researcher
Marie Cobthorne. "We were sure it was ASD but we couldn't
find any application that could be doing it - for the most part
he was
using Cygwin, though installed on Windows. It was only when he
was done for the day and shutting his down his PC that I found
the solution.
I saw the words 'Saving your Settings' appear on his screen and
hang there - it was incredible - B stopped talking midword and
sat motionless
for a full seven minutes."
"The good news is that usually the effects are reversible," Turner
explained. "It is simply a matter of uninstalling the offending
software and sticking to better written applications. Of course,
Microsoft employees are not that lucky," he added.
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