{"title":"Mitigating Negative Effects of Immersive Virtual Avatars on Racial Bias","authors":"Divine Maloney","doi":"10.1145/3270316.3270599","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Immersive virtual avatars can powerfully affect a user's behavior. Some changes in behavior can be positive, although some can be negative and unknown to the user. A hypothesis could be made that embodying an immersive virtual avatar could negatively effect a user's implicit bias, this would be a serious cause for concern with regard to the recent emergence of consumer virtual reality games. Here, I describe a pilot study exploring the area of immersive virtual avatars and their effects on a user's implicit associations. In this study n=26 where white males were either a white or black avatar, and then proceeded to shoot at human-shaped cutouts in a simulated shooting game. A significant difference was observed between two conditions, however in the opposite direction that was hypothesized; participants who embodied the white avatar recorded a lower implicit bias.","PeriodicalId":344253,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2018-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"10","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3270599","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 10
Abstract
Immersive virtual avatars can powerfully affect a user's behavior. Some changes in behavior can be positive, although some can be negative and unknown to the user. A hypothesis could be made that embodying an immersive virtual avatar could negatively effect a user's implicit bias, this would be a serious cause for concern with regard to the recent emergence of consumer virtual reality games. Here, I describe a pilot study exploring the area of immersive virtual avatars and their effects on a user's implicit associations. In this study n=26 where white males were either a white or black avatar, and then proceeded to shoot at human-shaped cutouts in a simulated shooting game. A significant difference was observed between two conditions, however in the opposite direction that was hypothesized; participants who embodied the white avatar recorded a lower implicit bias.