Social presence is enhanced when high-visual realism is matched with high-behavioral realism - in other words, when attractiveness is combined with our expectations of attractiveness. Social presence - how much you feel connected to an online environment with others - is also impacted by avatar choice. Together, these two studies show that our virtual bodies can change how we interact with others in actual avatar-based online communities as well as in subsequent face-to-face interactions. In addition to causing a behavioral difference within the virtual environment, the authors found that participants given taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in subsequent face-to-face interactions than participants given shorter avatars. They then interacted with a confederate for about 15 minutes. Participants were placed in an immersive virtual environment and were given either shorter or taller avatars. Parsons book The Proteus effect: stem cells and their promise for medicine, named for the mythical sea god who could change his shape at will.
In the second study, it was found that the behavioral changes stemming from the virtual environment transferred to subsequent face-to-face interactions. It was found that both the height and attractiveness of an avatar in an online game were significant predictors of the player’s performance. The first study extends the work beyond laboratory settings to an actual online community. The Proteus effect exists for console video games, and was observed within this study because a change in self representation via the DA caused an observable change in behavior. Well, the researchers (Yee et al., 2009) looked at that too 2 years later to see if the effects held up in real online interactions: These two studies show the dramatic and almost instantaneous effect that avatars have on behavior in digital environments.īut wait, you say, these are just laboratory studies! How do people behave in a real online world? Thus, the height of their avatars impacted how confident participants became. In our second study, participants who had taller avatars were more willing to make unfair splits in negotiation tasks than those who had shorter avatars, whereas participants with shorter avatars were more willing to accept unfair offers than those who had taller avatars. In other words, the attractiveness of their avatars impacted how intimate participants were willing to be with a stranger.
Participants who had more attractive avatars exhibited increased self-disclosure and were more willing to approach opposite-gendered strangers after less than 1 minute of exposure to their altered avatar. Across different behavioral measures and different representational manipulations, we observed the effect of an altered self-representation on behavior.