OPINION BETWEEn THE LInES

sive statement communicated by an aesthetically aggressive avatar. What about an angry message communicated by a sheepish avatar? Or a snide, biting comment delivered by a sweet, charming avatar? An analysis by OKCupid revealed that dating-profile pictures that showed people doing something (e.g., with animals, travel photos) generated substantially more interesting conversations. Does the visual instance change the impact of the message on its receiver [ 8]?

In a 1995 study Clifford Nass
and Byron Reeves bestowed
computers with “personalities”
and tested similar questions
in an experiment between
computers and humans. They
started with dominant and
submissive personalities and,
assigning these attributes to
the computers, paired comput-
ers and users together to see
if these personalities evoked
the same results they would
in human-human interactions.
(Personalities were assigned
through a combination of
dialog-box characteristics and
content.) The expectation was
that dominant users would pre-
fer dominant computers, and
submissive users, submissive
computers. Their hypothesis
was, in fact, correct [ 9].

Choice. In a social setting,
there are clear responsibilities:
One has allegiances to a social
circle, family, work, perhaps
social causes, and all of these
contribute to an individual’s
behavior in a social encounter.
What responsibilities, however,
does a person have on these
same levels for maintaining an
avatar? While IBM has devel-
oped an avatar style sheet that
outlines behavioral and aes-
thetic guidelines for use (e.g.,
“be sensitive about appearances
when meeting with clients”),
there is no Emily Post-like
guidance, quite thankfully, on
avatar use for the rest of us [ 6].
So are there social standards
for their use? People tend to
change avatars in four ways:
• Events: seasons, holidays
(e.g., Christmas, New Year)
• Affiliation: sports team,
company
• Social causes: awareness
(e.g., breast cancer awareness),
national causes, elections, blue-
beanie day
• Status: points, color (e.g.,
Color Wars), demonstration of
beauty or wealth
With all, an individual must
make a choice as to whether or
not to change the avatar. Issues
of time, duration, announce-
ment, and scale arise. How

[ 4] Grohol Psyd, J. “The Proteus Effect: How Our Avatar Changes Online Behavior.” http:// psychcentral.com/blog/ archives/2009/11/24/ the-proteus-effect-how-our-avatar-changes-online-behavior/ [ 5] Nowak, K.L., and Rauh, C. “The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction.” http://jcmc. indiana.edu/vol11/ issue1/ nowak.html/ [ 6] Reeves, B. J., and Read, L. Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009.

May + June 2010

Four core considerations
I’ll highlight four areas where I
think we have work left to do.