The Expression of Personality in Virtual Worlds

Personality is an interesting thing. It can be experienced face to face, indirectly through the artifacts one leaves in personal spaces, even technologically across facebook and personal websites. The question follows then: how do our interactions in virtual worlds express our personality?

My last post spoke of the susceptibility of children to false memories created through their interactions with virtual worlds. The question that lingers is that of the real vs the virtual - what is real? If a person behaves one way during physical interactions and another in virtual interactions is one more 'real' than the other? Or are both just a function of the same personality expressing itself?

Yee et al (cited below) found that we express our personality in both behavioural and linguistic forms in virtual worlds. Yet they admit that their findings do not agree with previous studies on the issue.

They explored what the termed as the 'Big Five' personality factors: Emotional Stability, Extroversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Their findings suggest that how we behave in virtual worlds remains consistent over time - not in comparison to the physical world necessarily, however. On the contrary, the language we use tends to change more often. The authors of the study suggest that is because of situational interference in the measures they used. When an individual can, "Teleport from a poetry reading to a disco party" it is expected that one's language would change to reflect the different situations.

They continue to argue that is is the measure itself that failed as internet language is vastly different in nature from spoken or more formal written forms.

So what does this all mean? The important take away from this piece seems to be that how we behave in the virtual world is consistent over time. This suggests that rather than just putting on a new face we are exploring facets of our true selves. Our Avatars are not completely cut off from our physical mental states.

This would suggest that while some can changes Avatars as they would clothes, most of us are more personally invested in our online selves. What this study fails to tell us is just how these moments in virtual space correspond to our physical selves. Can predictions of personality based on online observances be used to predict behaviour in physical situations?

I remember the philosophy of dualism. The mind and body are thought to be separate but connected entities. Do our forays into virtual worlds extend this to a third self? Are we all made up of a mind, body, and Avatar?

Yee, N., Harris, H., Jabon, M., & Bailenson, J. N. (2010). The Expression of personality in virtual worlds. VHIL: Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Retrieved from vhil.stanford.edu