Proteus vs. social identity effects on virtual brainstorming

ABSTRACT

Avatars are known to influence behaviour through their individual identity cues (Proteus effect) and through their shared identity cues (Social identity effect). The aim of this study was to investigate these two processes in a crossed design, in order to examine their interaction in the context of a brainstorming task. To activate the Proteus effect, we used creative avatars resembling inventors, and to make social identity salient, we made the avatars wear the traditional clothing of the participants’ school. The resulting factorial design included four conditions: creative avatars with or without social identity cues, and non-creative avatars with or without social identity cues. The results show that creative performance was higher with creative than non-creative avatars, but only in the absence of social identity cues. Furthermore, the presence of social identity cues increased social identification to the group, but this unexpectedly decreased creative performance. This result is discussed together with an analysis of the meaning of the social identity cues we used, which appeared to be unrelated to creativity. This discussion highlights that the effects of social identity cues on performance are complex and may be moderated by their meaning and the particular facet of social identity they make salient.

KEYWORDS:

• Avatar
• Proteus effect
• social identity model of deindividuation effects

Acknowledgements

The authors thank their collaborators from Arts et Métiers ParisTech who contributed to data collection: Jessy Barré, Frédéric Segonds, Fabrice Mantelet and Nicolas Maranzana.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Part of the present dataset has previously been used to show the effect of avatar appearance on creativity (Guegan et al. 2016) and the effect of SIC on creativity (Guegan et al. 2017). All in all, 62.6% of the data used in the present study have never been published.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agence Nationale de la Recherche [grant number ANR-12-SOIN-0005].