Androgynous Avatars
By Leila Sattary
A recent study into digital personas, aka ‘avatars’ has revealed that we find androgynous avatars less trustworthy than those that are clearly male or female.We web users often use avatars to represent ourselves while chatting and networking. These days even companies use them to interact with customers. As the internet has expanded over the last ten years, avatars have become more sophisticated and are now often in 3D with a high degree of customisation available.
Kristin Nowak and Christian Rauh from the University of Connecticut have explored how we trust avatars by pairing up volunteers and asking them to get to know each other online. The avatars ranged from a blonde girl with pigtails to a ketchup bottle with a face. After chatting online for a short period of time, volunteers were asking to rate how trustworthy they felt their partner was, as well as how androgynous they seemed.
The results clearly showed that avatars with obvious male or female personas were the most trustworthy. Androgynous avatars were next and the ketchup bottle would have been last, but for a lizard.
Researchers say that androgyny makes avatars seem less human, causing mistrust. They advise people, especially companies, to take care when choosing an avatar as it greatly effects how we perceive the person behind the pixels. First impressions are everything, even on the web, so chose the avatars that represent you very, very carefully.Get to grips with the virtual world...
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Image: Second Life
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