Wednesday, February 6, 2008

SL gender proximity and eye contact

http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee,%20Bailenson,%20Urbanek,%20Chang%20&%20Merget%20-%20SL%20NonVerbal.pdf

The summary is that male-male dyads stand closer to each other than female-female dyads. Male-female dyads stand even closer still. Also males are less likely to look at each other than females. Finally, the closer two avatars were, the less likely they were to look at each other.

The main thing to take away from this that we can predict some in-world behavior based on real-world behavior. It would be interesting to see how many behaviors transfer over like this, and which don't. We can then think about 'why,' and what it means for us in the 'real world.'

2 comments:

Vic Tokai said...

I think I read that females in real life tend to make eye contact more than males, at least at a young age. But the thing is that most female avatars are female, so why would female-female avatar situations cause greater eye contact? Something better to look at maybe?

Steve said...

Males usually prefer less intimacy with other males while females tend to prefer intimacy with other females. Eye contact is one way to raise intimacy.