In a growing number of online communities, users are encouraged to create a virtual avatar to represent them in those communities.  A recent study from the University of Alberta explores whether those avatars are a realistic representation of the person or whether we push the boundaries a little when engaging online.

The researchers examined the avatars people create when joining the virtual Second Life community, before comparing them with self-assessment data from those users.  In transpired that there tends to be a balancing act between trying to be oneself and trying to enhance oneself when creating our avatar.

“We wanted to examine which aspects of their identity people choose to embellish and how much, and what these choices imply for their online behaviours,” the authors explain.

Avatars would usually retain basic identity characteristics, such as our gender and ethnicity, aspects such as our body type and hair were more open to experimentation.

“Part of our research says that people with more attractive representations of themselves online report that their behaviour online is more extroverted, loud and risk-taking,” the authors explain.  “We expect that they keep their core behavioural traits, but some of their behavioural traits become amplified or enhanced, just like they enhance some of their appearance traits.”

If we can understand these processes better, the authors believe that we might be able to better motivate desirable behaviors online by allowing people to modify their avatars in such a way that those behaviors are inspired.

Wishful thinking

The study mirrors findings from previous work from researchers at York University, which explored whether our avatars are accurate reflections of our true selves.  Do we choose avatars to reflect who we are, or who we’d like to be, for instance?

“For example, if my perception of someone’s extraversion closely matches their true level of extraversion, without any reference to how this related to average levels of extraversion, this is overall accuracy,” the researchers say. “If I can accurately perceive how much more extraverted than average a person is, that involves distinctive accuracy.”

The study saw participants create their own custom avatars, with a second group then rating the avatars created for things such as openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (the big five personality traits).

The results suggest that some of these traits are much easier to communicate in an avatar than others.  For instance, it suggests that avatars are great at showing extroversion or anxiousness, but openness and conscientiousness much less so.

Alas, those who were somewhat neurotic were much less likely to create an avatar that reflected this side of them (unlike their sociable peers).

The study revealed that avatar characteristics such as open eyes, a smile, an oval face and brown hair were more commonly associated with a friendly character.

By contrast, avatars with black and short hair, a hat or sunglasses, and a non-smiling expression were generally regarded as much less friendly.

Interestingly, avatars created by females were more likely to be regarded as open and conscientious, almost by default, regardless of the actual traits of their creator.

“One possibility is that digital contexts activate different gender stereotypes than in real-world contexts, but more research is necessary to explore this,” the researchers say.

The researchers also caution that their exploration focused on relatively simple avatars, and future studies will have to explore more complex representations.  They do believe however that their work gives us some useful insight into how accurate our avatars are at reflecting our personalities.