Avatar Is Not Just a Movie

You may hear about a study that suggests the attractiveness of your avatar in a virtual world influences how you’ll be treated. If you’d like to read the full-text of the study by Banakou & Chorianopoulis (2010) you can access the article here. Richard Landers has a nice summary and discussion of the article here – if you’d like a second opinion.

I’ll add a few cautions to the information contained in the above links:

• the article contains a number of assertions followed by the following statement in bold text: “Error! Reference source not found” – I’ve not seen this before in a published article but I do find it a bit concerning.
• there’s no discussion of how the 9 (small n) subjects were recruited
• attractiveness was not clearly defined
• the article provides only descriptive statistics – no inferential statistics are presented

The authors describe the results of this study as “initial evidence” – so while their results are not surprising it is too early to generalize this line of research to the population at large.

Wayne Hooke

About these ads