In one study, female participants were less sensitive to the effects of stereotype threat (i.e., being told that women tend to perform worse than men on a working memory task they were about to complete) when embodying a male compared to a female avatar 5. Gender swap illusions have similarly prompted users to engage in stereotype-relevant behaviors, such as conforming to gender-stereotyped language norms when embodying gendered avatars 12 or engaging more in killing versus healing behaviors when embodying male versus female avatars 13. Furthermore, avatar embodiment might not only change the perception of others but also the self, as the identification with a child-like virtual body, for example, results in stronger self-association of child-like personality traits 10, as well as in a shift towards a more child-like pitched voice 11. For example, embodiment of an elderly 9 or dark-skinned 4 person can reduce negative stereotypes towards such outgroup members in young or light-skinned adults, respectively. Along these lines, virtual body swap studies have demonstrated that embodiment of avatars that visually diverge from one’s physical characteristics can exert strong influences on cognition. This effect is believed to result from a deindividuation process in virtual environments, during which “virtual cues take precedence over physical cues” (Yee et al. It has been suggested that such alterations of embodiment induce a so-called Proteus effect, where the embodiment of an avatar elicits behaviors and cognition concomitant with attributes and stereotypes of the embodied avatar 7.
Male body swap skin#
The precise sensory control of the virtual body, coupled with synchronous visuotactile and/or visuomotor feedback between the participant’s own body and the avatar, make VR a powerful tool to induce a strong temporary sense of embodiment, even in the presence of salient dissimilarities, such as different skin tones 4 or gender 5, 6. This relation has often been investigated with multisensory stimulation paradigms, such as the rubber hand illusion 3, and more recently also in virtual reality (VR). In line with this idea, mounting evidence has demonstrated that experimentally induced temporary changes in the sense of one’s own body can alter a broad range of cognitive and affective processes, including social cognition (for a review, see Maister et al. While such a relation was initially proposed primarily for the physical body, it has increasingly been extended to the subjectively perceived body as well, which is known to be plastic and shaped by both sensory inputs and prior expectancies (e.g., Dijkermann and Lenggenhager 1). To conclude, while we showed that a virtual gender swap indeed alters decision-making, gender-based expectancies cannot account for all the task-specific interpersonal and intertemporal changes following the virtual gender swap.Įmbodied cognition proposes a strong reciprocal link between bodily and cognitive processes. Lastly, the manipulation had no effects on implicit and explicit identification with gendered traits. Moreover, women embodying a male avatar in particular were more sensitive to temptations of immediate rewards. Contrary to our hypothesis, our results show that participants made less prosocial decisions (i.e., became more selfish) in different-gender avatars, independent of their own biological sex. To relate potential effects to changes in self-perception, we also measured implicit and explicit identification with gendered (or gender-typical) traits prior to and following the virtual experience, and used questionnaires that assessed the strength of the illusion. We hypothesized that a virtual gender swap would elicit social behaviors that stereotypically align with the gender of the avatar. In a between-subjects design, we differentiated between specifically social and non-social decision-making by means of a virtually administered interpersonal and intertemporal discounting task, respectively. To examine whether a virtual gender swap can alter gender-specific differences in prosociality, 48 men and 51 women embodied either a same- or different-gender avatar in immersive virtual reality. Economic decision-making paradigms have repeatedly shown that women tend to display more prosocial sharing choices than men. One particular emergent area of interest is the investigation of how virtual gender swaps can influence choice behaviors. Mounting evidence has demonstrated that embodied virtual reality, during which physical bodies are replaced with virtual surrogates, can strongly alter cognition and behavior even when the virtual body radically differs from one’s own.