Jeremy N. Bailenson

The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments

Every day, millions of users interact in real-time via avatars in online environments, such as massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These online environments could potentially be unique research platforms for the social sciences and clinical therapy, but it is crucial to first establish that social behavior and norms in virtual environments are comparable to those in the physical world. In an observational study of Second Life, a virtual community, we collected data from avatars in order to explore whether social norms of gender, interpersonal distance (IPD), and eye gaze transfer into virtual environments even though the modality of movement is entirely different (i.e., via keyboard and mouse as opposed to eyes and legs). Our results showed that established findings of IPD and eye gaze transfer into virtual environments: (1) male-male dyads have larger IPDs than female-female dyads, (2) male-male dyads maintain less eye contact than female-female dyads, and (3) decreases in IPD are compensated with gaze avoidance as predicted by the Equilibrium Theory. We discuss implications for users of online games as well as for social scientists who seek to conduct research in virtual environments.

TARGET ARTICLE: Immersive Virtual Environment Technology as a Methodological Tool for Social Psychology

Historically, at least 3 methodological problems have dogged experimental social psychology: the experimental control-mundane realism trade-off, lack of replication, and unrepresentative sampling. We argue that immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) can help ameliorate, if not solve, these methodological problems and, thus, holds promise as a new social psychological research tool. In this article, we first present an overview of IVET and review IVET-based research within psychology and other fields. Next, we propose a general model of social influence within immersive virtual environments and present some preliminary findings regarding its utility for social psychology. Finally, we present a new paradigm for experimental social psychology that may enable researchers to unravel the very fabric of social interaction.

Interpersonal Distance in Immersive Virtual Environments

Digital immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) enables behavioral scientists to conduct ecologically realistic experiments with near-perfect experimental control. The authors employed IVET to study the interpersonal distance maintained between participants and virtual humans. In Study 1, participants traversed a three-dimensional virtual room in which a virtual human stood. In Study 2, a virtual human approached participants. In both studies, participant gender, virtual human gender, virtual human gaze behavior, and whether virtual humans were allegedly controlled by humans (i.e., avatars) or computers (i.e., agents) were varied. Results indicated that participants maintained greater distance from virtual humans when approaching their fronts compared to their backs. In addition, participants gave more personal space to virtual agents who engaged them in mutual gaze. Moreover, when virtual humans invaded their personal space, participants moved farthest from virtual human agents. The advantages and disadvantages of IVET for the study of human behavior are discussed.

The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-Representation on Online and Offline Behavior

Virtual environments allow individuals to dramatically alter their self-representation. More important, studies have shown that people infer their expected behaviors and attitudes from observing their avatars appearance, a phenomenon known as the Proteus effect. For example, users given taller avatars negotiated more aggressively than users given shorter avatars. Two studies are reported here that extend our understanding of this effect. The first study extends the work beyond laboratory settings to an actual online community. It was found that both the height and attractiveness of an avatar in an online game were significant predictors of the players performance. In the second study, it was found that the behavioral changes stemming from the virtual environment transferred to subsequent face-to-face interactions. Participants were placed in an immersive virtual environment and were given either shorter or taller avatars. They then interacted with a confederate for about 15 minutes. 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. 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.

Equilibrium Theory Revisited: Mutual Gaze and Personal Space in Virtual Environments

During the last half of the twentieth century, psychologists and anthropologists have studied proxemics, or spacing behavior, among people in many contexts. As we enter the twenty-first century, immersive virtual environment technology promises new experimental venues in which researchers can study proxemics. Immersive virtual environments provide realistic and compelling experimental settings without sacrificing experimental control. The experiment reported here tested Argyle and Deans (1965) equilibrium theorys specification of an inverse relationship between mutual gaze, a nonverbal cue signaling intimacy, and interpersonal distance. Participants were immersed in a three-dimensional virtual room in which a virtual human representation (that is, an embodied agent) stood. Under the guise of a memory task, participants walked towards and around the agent. Distance between the participant and agent was tracked automatically via our immersive virtual environment system. All participants maintained more space around agents than they did around similarly sized and shaped but nonhuman-like objects. Female participants maintained more interpersonal distance between themselves and agents who engaged them in eye contact (that is, mutual gaze behavior) than between themselves and agents who did not engage them in eye contact, whereas male participants did not. Implications are discussed for the study of proxemics via immersive virtual environment technology, as well as the design of virtual environments and virtual humans.

The independent and interactive effects of embodied-agent appearance and behavior on self-report, cognitive, and behavioral markers of copresence in immersive virtual environments

The current study examined how assessments of copresence in an immersive virtual environment are influenced by variations in how much an embodied agent resembles a human being in appearance and behavior. We measured the extent to which virtual representations were both perceived and treated as if they were human via self-report, behavioral, and cognitive dependent measures. Distinctive patterns of findings emerged with respect to the behavior and appearance of embodied agents depending on the definition and operationalization of copresence. Independent and interactive effects for appearance and behavior were found suggesting that assessing the impact of behavioral realism on copresence without taking into account the appearance of the embodied agent (and vice versa) can lead to misleading conclusions. Consistent with the results of previous research, copresence was lowest when there was a large mismatch between the appearance and behavioral realism of an embodied agent.

The Use of Immersive Virtual Reality in the Learning Sciences: Digital Transformations of Teachers, Students, and Social Context

This article illustrates the utility of using virtual environments to transform social interaction via behavior and context, with the goal of improving learning in digital environments. We first describe the technology and theories behind virtual environments and then report data from 4 empirical studies. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that teachers with augmented social perception (i.e., receiving visual warnings alerting them to students not receiving enough teacher eye gaze) were able to spread their attention more equally among students than teachers without augmented perception. In Experiments 2 and 3, we demonstrated that by breaking the rules of spatial proximity that exist in physical space, students can learn more by being in the center of the teachers field of view (compared to the periphery) and by being closer to the teacher (compared to farther away). In Experiment 4, we demonstrated that inserting virtual co-learners who were either model students or distracting students changed the learning abilities of experiment participants who conformed to the virtual co-learners. Results suggest that virtual environments will have a unique ability to alter the social dynamics of learning environments via transformed social interaction. We would like to thank Roy Pea, Byron Reeves, and the Stanford LIFE lab for helpful suggestions and Sandra Okita and Dan Schwartz for suggestions as well as for detailed comments on an earlier draft of this article. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant 0527377.

The Effect of Behavioral Realism and Form Realism of Real-Time Avatar Faces on Verbal Disclosure, Nonverbal Disclosure, Emotion Recognition, and Copresence in Dyadic Interaction

The realism of avatars in terms of behavior and form is critical to the development of collaborative virtual environments. In the study we utilized state of the art, real-time face tracking technology to track and render facial expressions unobtrusively in a desktop CVE. Participants in dyads interacted with each other via either a video-conference (high behavioral realism and high form realism), voice only (low behavioral realism and low form realism), or an emotibox that rendered the dimensions of facial expressions abstractly in terms of color, shape, and orientation on a rectangular polygon (high behavioral realism and low form realism). Verbal and non-verbal self-disclosure were lowest in the videoconference condition while self-reported copresence and success of transmission and identification of emotions were lowest in the emotibox condition. Previous work demonstrates that avatar realism increases copresence while decreasing self-disclosure. We discuss the possibility of a hybrid realism solution that maintains high copresence without lowering self-disclosure, and the benefits of such an avatar on applications such as distance learning and therapy.

Virtual Humans and Persuasion: The Effects of Agency and Behavioral Realism

Two studies examined whether participant attitudes would change toward positions advocated by an ingroup member even if the latter was known to be an embodied agent; that is, a human-like representation of a computer algorithm. While immersed in a virtual environment, participants listened to a persuasive communication from a digital representation of another student. The latter was actually an embodied agent (a computer-controlled digital representation of a human). Study 1 examined the extent to which gender of the virtual human, participant gender, and the agents behavior affected attitude change. Results revealed gender-based ingroup favoritism in the form of greater attitude change for same gender virtual humans. Study 2 examined behavioral realism and agency beliefs; that is, whether participants believed the other to be an agent or an avatar (an online representation of an actual person). Results supported Blascovich and colleagues model of social influence within immersive virtual environments. Specifically, the prediction that virtual humans high in behavioral realism would be more influential than those low in behavioral realism was supported, but this effect was moderated by the gender of the virtual human and the research participant. Implications of these findings for the model are discussed.

A meta-analysis of the impact of the inclusion and realism of human-like faces on user experiences in interfaces

The use of embodied agents, defined as visual human-like representations accompanying a computer interface, is becoming prevalent in applications ranging from educational software to advertisements. In the current work, we assimilate previous empirical studies which compare interfaces with visually embodied agents to interfaces without agents, both using an informal, descriptive technique based on experimental results (46 studies) as well as a formal statistical meta-analysis (25 studies). Results revealed significantly larger effect sizes when analyzing subjective responses (i.e., questionnaire ratings, interviews) than when analyzing behavioral responses such as task performance and memory. Furthermore, the effects of adding an agent to an interface are larger than the effects of animating an agent to behave more realistically. However, the overall effect sizes were quite small (e.g., across studies, adding a face to an interface only explains approximately 2.5% of the variance in results). We discuss the implications for both designers building interfaces as well as social scientists designing experiments to evaluate those interfaces.