The effects of Avatars’ Gender and Appearance on Social Behavior in Online 3D Virtual Worlds

TLDR

The study investigates how avatar gender and appearance influence users’ sociability and communication preferences in 3D virtual worlds. The authors used a virtual ethnographic approach with nine participants using four avatar types, observing over 200 social encounters. Elaborate avatars increased encounter success, and female users more often approached male avatars when wearing attractive avatars, suggesting a self‑confidence effect.

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the effects of avatars’ appearance on user sociability in 3D virtual worlds. In particular, we study gender and appearance differences in social communication preferences and behavior in virtual public spaces. For this purpose, we have employed the virtual ethnographic method, which is an adaptation of traditional ethnography for the study of cyberspace. Although we only employed nine users who used four different avatars, we observed a cumulative of more than two hundreds social encounters. We found that users with more elaborate avatars had a higher success rate in their social encounters, than those users with the default avatars. Most notably, female users selected to speak with male avatars much more frequently, when using the attractive avatar, which indicates a self-confidence effect induced by the appearance of the personal avatar.