Magazine "NewScientist" 20 February 2010

"NewScientist" 20 February 2010

Even in the virtual world, men judge women on looks.

HOW is a female avatar supposed to get a fair treatment in the virtual world? They should rely on human females - men can't help but be swayed by looks.
Thanks to video games and blockbuster movies, people are increasingly engaging with avatars and robots. So Karl MacDorman of Purdue School of Engineering and Technology in Indianapolis, Indiana, decided to find out how people treated avatars when faced with an ethical dilemma. Does an avatar's lack of humanity mean people fail to empathise with them? The answer seems to depend on gender.
He presented 682 volunteers with a dilemma modified from a medical ethics training programme. Playing the role of the doctor, they were faced with the female avatar, Kelly Gordon, pleading with them not to tell her husband at his next check-up that she had contracted genital herpes. The dilemma is intended to make medical students consider issues like doctor-patient confidentiality, not to produce a right or wrong answer, says MacDorman.\Gordon was presented to the volunteers in one of four different ways, either as an actress superimposed on a computer generated (CG) background (pictured) - and then either edited to move smoothly or in a jerky, unnatural way.
Overall, women responded more sympathetically to Gordon, with 52 per cent acceding to her request compared with 45 per cent of men. But whereas women's attitudes were consistent however Gordon was presented, the male volunteers' attitudes swung sharply. The two human versions got a far more sympathetic hearing than their avatar counterparts. "Clearly, presentational factors influence people's decisions of moral and ethical consequence," says MacDorman. "The different response from volunteers could suggest men showed more empathy towards characters that they see as a potential mate," he says.
However, Jesse Fox, a human-computer interaction researcher at Stanford University in California, who has studied female chracterisation in virtual environments, believes the less favourable attitude shown by men towards the CG Gordon may be explained by the fact that the avatar was more sexualised than the human one - with a bare midriff and fuller breasts.
"Sexualised representations of women are often judged to be dishonest, or 'loose', and more so by men than by women. This could explain the finding, especially in a situation in which you're talking about sexually transmitted diseases," she says.
The study will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Presence.