Identity in Pixels: The Interplay of Personality, Self-Discrepancy, and Avatar Type in Social Virtual Reality

February 21th, 2024

Aleksandra Zheleva & Emma Emmerechts

"Actually, I think this look was the first thing I saw when it came on screen. And I thought, oh, it looks like Ed Sheeran and I love Ed Sheeran. So I decided to go for that. But I got the outfit changed a bit, I wanted a different colour sweater. But other than that it was mainly inspired by Ed Sheeran."

• Participant 42

The avatar of participant 42 looking at the virtual mirror in the VRChat room used in the experiment.

The recent investment surge of leading technology companies such as Meta and Apple in the development and marketing of VR devices and platforms can only mean one thing - VR is here to stay and even more so here to change the way we work and communicate. One of the most characteristic traits of communication in VR is that it’s done via an avatar - a virtual representation of yourself. And sure, maybe an Ed Sheeran look-alike won't be the first choice for your avatar, but how do you decide who will?

So, a question arises: What factors play a role in creating an avatar in social VR?

Analytics Insight, 2023 

In our study, 72 participants created an avatar that they used during a short VR session in VRChat. To better understand the type of avatar the participants created, they rated it on a scale of how realistic their avatar was. Some created an avatar that closely resembled themselves (realistic), while others made minor adjustments, such as a different hair colour (idealistic). Still, others chose a creative character, such as a crazy dragon, that was completely different from their real identity (fantasized).

We then asked participants to report on certain personality traits of theirs - openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (aka the Big Five), self-discrepancy between who they are and who their ideal and ought self is and self-esteem.

What did we find?

A particpant going through their 15-minutes-long experience in VRChat.

Let me gently (or maybe not so gently) let you down and set your expectations about our findings - we didn’t get the breakthrough insights we were hoping for.

Even though we saw that higher conscientiousness and extraversion lead to higher self-esteem and higher neuroticism was related to lower self-esteem among our participants, we did not find that any of the personality traits explained what type of avatar people created. And neither did self-esteem.

Interestingly, we saw that the higher the tension between who people thought they were and who they thought they ought to be (as dictated by societal roles and expectations) led to lower self-esteem among our participants. But once again that did not explain the type of avatars they made.

So why were our expectations not confirmed?

I have been haunted by this question for quite some time now and I can give you a myriad of possible answers. But I think all these reasons boil down to the fact that constructing your virtual identity is not as linear, rigid and straightforward a process as us researchers might want it to be. And this is where the crux of this study lies in - our somewhat naive noition that a set of questionnaires (albeit reliable and validated) can capture the intricacy and nuances of the processes that go into constructing our virtual identities.

Now, I am not saying that personality traits, self-esteem and self-discrepancies don’t have a certain influence on whether I choose to represent myself as a humanoid avatar or a carrot dressed as a fox in VRChat. But there is certainly more to it - my context, my creativity, my upbringing to name a few. And this is something that I believe we can only capture via more qualitative methodologies such as interviews.

And indeed talking to our participants we saw some of these processes come to the surface. Just go through a few of the quotes from our interviews below.

A selection of extracts from the interviews we conducted with all of our participants after their experience in VRChat.

So what does Ed Sheeran have to do with Virtual Reality?

Actually quite a lot. If this study illustrates something it is that creating an avatar within social VR is a complex phenomenon. Do we choose a virtual persona based on a complex combination of individual characteristics, or simply based on what we like?

I guess to look into these questions we will need further studies. In the meantime, if you didn't get a chance to snag a ticket to The Eras tour, why not just virtually be Taylor Swift herself?

This research was carried out with the help of Emma Emmerechts and Annabel De Clercq as a part of the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO Fellowship: 1G6522N) project .