Abstract
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. One particular emergent area of interest is the investigation of how virtual gender swaps can influence choice behaviors. Economic decision-making paradigms have repeatedly shown that women tend to display more prosocial sharing choices than men. 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. 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. We hypothesized that a virtual gender swap would elicit social behaviors that stereotypically align with the gender of the avatar. 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. 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. Moreover, women embodying a male avatar in particular were more sensitive to temptations of immediate rewards. Lastly, the manipulation had no effects on implicit and explicit identification with gendered traits. 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.
Highlights
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
Swapping into a different-gender rather than a same-gender avatar rendered behavior more selfish, independent of the participants’ or the avatar’s gender. This finding was further substantiated by the mixed generalized linear models (MGLMs) regressing binary choices (0 = selfish choice, 1 = prosocial choice) on predictors for Sex, Group, Social Distance, Selfish Reward, and the interaction effects (Table S1)
We argued that embodying the avatar of a different gender enhanced this sense of dissimilarity; future research should examine whether this effect is specific to gender differences, or whether embodying a virtual body that differs in other characteristics could affect decision-making
Summary
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. Tacikowski et al.[15] demonstrated that a few minutes of immersion in a gender swap illusion resulted in altered implicit and explicit identification with gendered (or gender-typical) traits, in a shift towards a more balanced identification with both genders, as well as concomitant decreases in gender-stereotyped beliefs about oneself While most of these paradigms examined changes during or immediately following the illusion, a few studies have assessed the longevity of cognitive alterations following virtual embodiment, and determined that some virtual embodiment manipulations induced changes that persisted for at least one week[16]. Several behavioral economic studies have corroborated robust gender differences in social decision-making[20], while a recent neuropharmacological study by Soutschek et al.[21] further substantiated such gender-specific prosocial preferences on a neural level by showing increased responses in the striatum, a component of the neural reward system, to prosociality in women
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