A lot of websites give you the
chance to represent yourself with an avatar rather than a picture of
yourself. Avatars are often cartoon-y
pictures with facial features, clothing, and accessories that allow you to personalize
your picture. For example, this website
allows you to create an avatar to use before entering a chat room.
The avatar you select can
influence the way people interact with you.
It is interesting to know whether people generally try to select avatars
that represent themselves accurately, or whether they aim to display themselves
differently to the electronic world than they appear in real life. It is also interesting to know the
conclusions that viewers draw when seeing someone’s avatar.
This question was addressed in a
study by Katrina Fong and Raymond Mar published in the February, 2015 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The researchers asked a group of
about 100 people to choose avatars for themselves using the (now defunct) website
weeworld.com. Half of the participants
were asked to create an avatar, and the other half were specifically asked to
create an avatar that would represent their personality accurately. There were no significant differences in the
avatars created by these groups suggesting that most people naturally try to
represent themselves accurately. These
participants filled out a personality inventory that measures the Big Five
personality traits after creating their avatar.
(The Big Five traits are Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness,
Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism.)
A second group of about 2,000
participants were shown a subset of the avatars and rated their perception of
the personality characteristics of the individuals who created those
avatars. They also rated how much they
would like to interact with the person who created that avatar.
One question that the researchers
asked up front was whether being able to categorize the participant by gender
influenced judgments of personality. The
avatars were all either recognizably male or female. Overall, people tended to think that the
males were slightly less conscientious and open to new experiences than the
females. But, this categorization tended
to decrease accuracy of judgments overall, because the sample of male
participants was not actually lower in conscientiousness or openness than the
sample of female participants.
The researchers compared people’s
ratings of their own personality characteristics to those of other people who
rated personality after seeing the avatars they constructed. The ratings of the avatars showed that people
could assess another person’s extraversion and agreeableness to some degree,
and could not do a particularly good job of rating the other characteristics.
The researchers also examined the
aspects of the avatars that were most correlated with people’s personality
ratings. For example, people high in
agreeableness tended to select avatars with open eyes more often than those low
in agreeableness. One reason why raters
were good at assessing an individual’s agreeableness from their avatar was that
they generally rated people as higher in agreeableness (and extraversion) if
the avatar had open eyes.
In general, though, the aspects of
avatars that raters thought were most important for judging a person’s
personality were not that diagnostic of the personality characteristic. For example, people tended to rate avatars
with short hair as more conscientious than those with long hair. In fact, this characteristic was more
strongly associated with the neuroticism of the person who created the avatar
than the conscientiousness of that individual.
People higher in neuroticism tended to have avatars with long hair.
One final data point of interest,
the characteristics of avatars did influence whether people were interested in
befriending the person. In particular,
people were most interested in being friends with people who had avatars with
open eyes, smiles, and an oval face and were least interested in being friends
with people who had a facial expression that was not a smile.
So, what does all of this mean?
There has been a lot of work
recently on what we can learn about the personality characteristics of others
from the things they create including personal spaces, Facebook pages, and
things they write. Overall, when people
create an avatar, it is hard to get to know much about them. You can get a little information about
extraversion and agreeableness, but the correlations are not large.
One thing that is interesting,
though, is that people do draw inferences about personality characteristics
from avatars. However, the aspects of
the avatars that they use to make judgments about someone’s personality are not
generally that highly correlated with that individual’s actual personality. Thus, people may overestimate their ability
to learn something about others from their avatars.
