Sex role stereotyping is hard to kill: A field experiment measuring social responses to user characteristics and behavior in an online multiplayer first-person shooter game

Sex role stereotyping by players in first-person shooter games and other online gaming environments may encourage a social environment that marginalizes and alienates female players. Consistent with the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE), the anonymity of online games may engender endorsement of group-consistent attitudes and amplification of social stereotyping, such as the adherence to gender norms predicted by expectations states theory. A 2 × 3 × 2 virtual field experiment (N = 520) in an online first-person shooter video game examined effects of a confederate players’ sex, communication style, and skill on players’ compliance with subsequent online friend requests. We found support for the hypothesis that, in general, women would gain more compliance with friend requests than men. We also found support for the hypothesis that women making positive utterances would gain more compliance with friend requests than women making negative utterances, whereas men making negative utterances would gain more compliance with friend requests than men making positive utterances. The hypothesis that player skill (i.e., game scores) would predict compliance with friend requests was not supported. Implications for male and female game players and computer-mediated communication in online gaming environments are discussed.     

Risk factors associated with online game addiction: A hierarchical model

Online gaming addiction has been increasingly recognized as a mental disorder. However, the predictive factors that lead to online gaming addiction are not well established. The aim of this study was to identify factors that may influence the development of online gaming addiction. A total of 263 patients with problematic online gaming addiction (255 males (97%) and 8 females (3%), age: mean = 20.4 ± 5.8 years) and153 healthy comparison subjects (118 males (77%) and 35 females (23%), age: 21.2 ± 5.5 years, range) were recruited for participation in the current study. Hierarchical logistic regression analyses among each set of variables were conducted. Individual factors (sex and age), cognitive factors (IQ and perseverative errors), psychopathological conditions (ADHD, depression, anxiety, and impulsivity), and social interaction factors (family environment, social anxiety, and self-esteem) were evaluated in a stepwise fashion. All four factors were associated with online gaming addiction, with psychopathological conditions being the strongest risk factors for the addiction. Individual factors, psychological factors, and social interactions were associated with the development of pure online gaming addiction. As before, psychological factors (attention, mood, anxiety and impulsivity) were the strongest risk factors for online gaming addiction in patients with pure online gaming addiction. Psychopathologies, including ADHD and depression, were the strongest factors associated with the development of online gaming addiction in individuals.     

Can synchronicity and visual modality enhance social presence in mobile messaging?

As companies move increasingly toward text-based computer-mediated communications (CMC) for providing customer service, they tend to lose out on the social presence of a live agent interacting in person or via the telephone. Given the importance of social presence for maintaining healthy customer relations, how can companies counter the relative lack of social presence in CMC? Increasing the synchronicity of communications is one solution, but it is not always possible to provide instant responses to customers. In such cases, can a richer modality (e.g., picture of the customer-service agent) make up for diminished synchronicity and thereby enhance social presence? We addressed these questions with a 3 [synchronicity: high (no delay in response time) vs. medium (1-h delay) vs. low (6-h delay)] × 3 [modality: text-only vs. text+picture vs. text+emoticon] ful factorial, between-subjects experiment in which participants (N = 108) interacted with a customer service agent in a mobile e-commerce context. Data reveal that participants in high synchronicity and text+emoticon conditions felt higher social presence and perceived the customer service agent more positively than those in other conditions. Social presence and task impression mediated the relationship between each independent variable and their evaluations of the customer service agent.     

Sexism in online video games: The role of conformity to masculine norms and social dominance orientation

Sexism toward women in online video game environments has become a pervasive and divisive issue in the gaming community. In this study, we sought to determine what personality traits, demographic variables, and levels of game play predicted sexist attitudes towards women who play video games. Male and female participants (N = 301) who were players of networked video games were invited to participate in an anonymous online survey. Social dominance orientation and conformity to some types of masculine norms (desire for power over women and the need for heterosexual self-presentation) predicted higher scores on the Video Game Sexism Scale (i.e., greater sexist beliefs about women and gaming). Implications for the social gaming environment and female gamers are discussed.     

Consumer attitudes toward blogger’s sponsored recommendations and purchase intention: The effect of sponsorship type,product type,and brand awareness

Sponsored recommendation blog posts, a form of online consumer review, are blog articles written by bloggers who receive benefits from sponsoring marketers to review and promote products on their personal blog. Because national regulations require that marketer sponsorship must be revealed in the blog post, sponsored recommendation posts can no longer conceal their marketing intent. Consumer’s attitudes toward sponsored recommendation posts are thus a vital issue in assessing the effectiveness of the advertisement. This study uses a 2(sponsorship type) × 2(product type) × 2(brand awareness) experimental design and a total of 613 valid samples to examine consumer attitudes toward sponsored recommendation posts and purchase intention. The results show that when products recommended in blog posts are search goods or have high brand awareness, consumers have highly positive attitudes toward sponsored recommendation posts, which improves purchase intention. The directly-monetary/indirect-monetary benefits received by the bloggers have no significant effect on readership attitudes. Using these features in blog writings appears to improve online readers’ trust toward and the credibility of sponsored recommendation posts and thus can be a vital online marketing tool for marketers.     

Do shy people feel less communication apprehension online? The effects of virtual reality on the relationship between personality characteristics and communication outcomes

This study examines the effect of 3D virtual worlds on an individual’s communication experience in comparison with Face-to-Face communications (FtFCs). Using 2 × 2 posttest only group design where subjects were asked to discuss over a given topic. This study investigated whether individuals’ different personality characteristics (i.e. shyness) influence communication experiences (i.e. communication apprehension). The data suggest that shy individuals felt less of communication apprehension during the discussion conducted online than FtFC. On the other hand, FtFC turned out to be more effective in influencing individuals’ intention to change behavior compared to virtual worlds. The results suggest that lack of visual/auditory cues in virtual reality is the major factor that influenced the outcome.     

Knowledge sharing and social media: Altruism,perceived online attachment motivation,and perceived online relationship commitment

Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, have become extremely popular. Facebook, for example, has more than a billion registered users and thousands of millions of units of information are shared every day, including short phrases, articles, photos, and audio and video clips. However, only a tiny proportion of these sharing units trigger any type of knowledge exchange that is ultimately beneficial to the users. This study draws on the theory of belonging and the intrinsic motivation of altruism to explore the factors contributing to knowledge sharing behavior. Using a survey of 299 high school students applying for university after the release of the public examination results, we find that perceived online attachment motivation (β = 0.31, p < 0.001) and perceived online relationship commitment (β = 0.49, p < 0.001) have positive, direct, and significant effects on online knowledge sharing (R² 0.568). Moreover, when introduced into the model, altruism has a direct and significant effect on online knowledge sharing (β = 0.46, p < 0.001) and the total variance explained by the extended model increases to 64.9%. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Facebook use and academic performance among college students: A mixed-methods study with a multi-ethnic sample

This paper uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the relation between online academic disclosure and academic performance. A multi-ethnic sample of college students (N = 261; male = 66; female = 195; M age ≈ 22 years) responded to open-ended questions about their Facebook use. Thematic analysis revealed that over 14% of the Facebook wall posts/status updates (N = 714) contained academic themes; positive states were more frequent than negative and neutral states and students with lower GPAs expressed negative states more often. A path analysis suggested that academic performance may determine college students’ Facebook use, rather than the reverse. Implications for student support services are discussed.     

Avatar creation in virtual worlds: Behaviors and motivations

Avatar creation has become common for people to participate and interact in virtual worlds. Using an online survey (N = 244), we investigated both the behavioral characteristics and major motivations for avatar creation in virtual worlds. Our results suggest that a majority of the participants had multiple avatars; these avatars’ appearance did not merely resemble the human players; and their personality did not necessarily mirror the player’s real personality. Furthermore, participants on average spent over 20 h per week and often interacting with others in the virtual worlds. Our exploratory factor analysis yielded four major motivations: virtual exploration, social navigation, contextual adaptation, and identity representation.     

Triggering participation: Exploring the effects of third-person and hostile media perceptions on online participation

Using a 2 × 3 mixed between-within subjects experiment (N = 102), we tested how the presence of online comments affects self-other differences and perceptions of media bias, as well as factors predicting subjects’ likelihood of commenting on an online news story. We found that (a) presence of comments lowers self-other differences and consequently attenuates the third-person effect, and (b) perceptions of media bias significantly predict likelihood of commenting. Additionally, we found that subjects were more likely to comment on stories they found biased against their position as a form of corrective action, and that subjects were more likely to share and like stories they found biased in favor of their position as a form of promotional action.     

Cultural values and Facebook use among Palestinian youth in Israel

Culture is a set of values that influences attitudes and social behavior. Despite the role of culture in shaping attitudes and motivations, most of the extensive research literature on the determinants and patterns of social media use has focused on psychological and social factors. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by investigating the role of cultural values in perceptions of privacy, trust and motivations for using Facebook among young Palestinians in Israel. We relied on Hall’s concept of high and low communication contexts and three of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: collectivism, power distance and uncertainty avoidance. Data from a survey of Arab high school students (N = 567) established that variations in the adoption of cultural values are associated with the motivation for using Facebook through their effect on trust and on privacy concerns. We discuss the findings and their implications.     

Physical and social presence in collaborative virtual environments: Exploring age and gender differences with respect to empathy

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) hold the immense potential of enhancing social inclusion and social support not only in younger but especially also in older people. However, there is still considerably little knowledge about the experiences of elderly when using CVEs. Additionally, there is reason to assume that men and women regardless of their age might also differ in their perceptions of CVEs, with this difference very likely being mediated by empathic abilities. Consequently, the main objective of the current study was to evaluate gender specific experiences of social and physical presence in a group of older (N = 62) and younger adults (N = 62) with respect to possible mediating influences of empathy. Results indicate no differences in physical and social presence between the two age groups, yet they support past findings that men experience more spatial presence, involvement and a higher sense of being there than women. Also, the empathy scale Fantasy considerably mediated gender differences in spatial presence, thus strengthening the theoretical assumption of a relationship between presence and empathy. Implications and future directions of these findings are discussed in detail.     

Differences in computer exposure between university administrators and CAD draftsmen

This study utilized an external logger system for onsite measurements of computer activities of two professional groups—twelve university administrators and twelve computer-aided design (CAD) draftsmen. Computer use of each participant was recorded for 10 consecutive days—an average of 7.9 ± 1.8 workdays and 7.8 ± 1.5 workdays for administrators and draftsmen, respectively. Quantitative parameters computed using recorded data were daily dynamic duration (DD) and static duration, daily keystrokes, mouse clicks, wheel scrolling counts, mouse movement and dragged distance, average typing and clicking rates, and average time holding down keys and mouse buttons. Significant group differences existed in the number of daily keystrokes (p < 0.0005) and mouse clicks (p < 0.0005), mouse distance moved (p < 0.0005), typing rate (p < 0.0001), daily mouse DD (p < 0.0001), and keyboard DD (p < 0.005). Both groups had significantly longer mouse DD than keyboard DD (p < 0.0001). Statistical analysis indicates that the duration of computer use for different computer tasks cannot be represented by a single formula with same set of quantitative parameters as those associated with mouse and keyboard activities. Results of this study demonstrate that computer exposure during different tasks cannot be estimated solely by computer use duration. Quantification of onsite computer activities is necessary when determining computer-associated risk of musculoskeletal disorders. Other significant findings are discussed.     

Investigating the moderating role of uncertainty avoidance cultural values on multidimensional online trust

Building online trust and understanding its relationship to online customer purchase decision making is important to e-commerce companies. We decided to investigate the moderating role of uncertainty avoidance on the relationship between subjective norms and online trust (integrity, ability, and benevolence) as well as purchase intention on a model we had developed. We generated a questionnaire and first pilot tested it (n = 116), and then modified it before performing the main test of our model (n = 209). Specifically, trust (cognition and affect based) was adapted to better understand social and cultural factors in online customer behavior. Uncertainty avoidance was found to moderate the relationships between subjective norms and two dimensions of cognition-based trust, (integrity and ability). Benevolence, however, was not found to have any relationship to cultural values or purchase intention. Normative influence on ability belief about the website was significant only when the online consumer had a high sense of uncertainty avoidance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Coping with information in social media: The effects of network structure and knowledge on perception of information value

The explosive growth of social media has intrigued many scholars to inquire into why people willingly share information with others. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to how people determine which information they share in the networked environment. In this study, a 2 (network density – dense vs. sparse) × 2 (knowledge – expert vs. novice) × 3 (information valence – negative vs. neutral vs. positive) online experiment was performed to examine how the three factors interact and cross over in shaping individuals’ perceptions of the value of information for themselves and for others in the network. Results show that individuals’ perceptions of information value are influenced not just by their level of knowledge, but also by how the network environment is structured. Implications for the findings are discussed.     

Misery rarely gets company: The influence of emotional bandwidth on supportive communication on Facebook

This study introduces the concept of emotional bandwidth to describe a communicator’s ability to use technological features to disclose personal affect online. Strategic use of emotional bandwidth was expected to correspond with interpersonal rewards, specifically the willingness of others to provide social support. Participants (N = 84) viewed hypothetical Facebook profiles that contained manipulated levels of emotional bandwidth and were asked how much support they would provide to the person in the profile. Participants who viewed profiles portraying high emotional bandwidth were less willing to provide social support; however, this finding was qualified by personal qualities. Females, people who perceived a sense of community, and people who had a preference for online social interaction indicated a greater willingness to provide support in the high emotional bandwidth condition. Implications for designing affective affordances in technologies and their psychological effects are discussed.     

The psychological functions of avatars and alt(s): A qualitative study

Prior research has shown that approximately 50% of active participants in the 3D virtual world of Second Life have one or more secondary avatars or “alts” in addition to their primary avatar. Thus, these individuals are operating a “multiple or poly-identity system” composed of a physical self, a primary avatar, and one or more alts. However, little is known about the functions these virtual identities serve for the virtual-world user. The current study involved qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews with Second Life participants (N = 24) who had a primary avatar and at least one alt. Interviews were coded to examine the functions that primary avatars and alts served. Eight functions—seven suggested by previous research on virtual world identity and one that emerged from analyses—were reflected in a large majority of the transcribed interviews and are described in the article. The current findings add to our understanding of how multifaceted identity systems operate, as more individuals augment their physical self with a set of virtual identities.     

Perpetuating online sexism offline: Anonymity,interactivity, and the effects of sexist hashtags on social media

Sexism and sexual harassment are not uncommon in online environments such as social networking sites, forums, and video games. This experiment investigated whether users’ anonymity and level of interactivity with sexist content on social media influenced sexist attitudes and offline behavior. Participants (N = 172) used a Twitter account that was anonymous or had personally identifying details. They were asked to share (i.e., retweet) or write posts incorporating a sexist hashtag. After exposure, participants completed two purportedly unrelated tasks, a survey and a job hiring simulation in which they evaluated male and female candidates’ resumés. Anonymous participants reported greater hostile sexism after tweeting than nonanonymous participants. Participants who composed sexist tweets reported greater hostile sexism and ranked female job candidates as less competent than those who retweeted, although this did not significantly affect their likelihood to hire.     

The interplay between immersion and appeal in video games

Immersion and appeal are considered to be necessary constituents of the player experience. In this article their relationship is examined through a 2 × 2 factorial study (n = 173) in the context of two games, a first-person shooter and a massively multi-player online role-playing game, and in the context of two types of players: experienced players who have never played the game in one of the genres in question, and experienced players who have played one of the games in question. It is found that immersion and appeal are linearly correlated, and the repercussions of this finding are discussed.     

A self-awareness approach to computer-mediated communication

Many explanations of both pro- and anti-social behaviors in computer-mediated communication (CMC) appear to hinge on changes in individual self-awareness. In spite of this, little research has been devoted to understanding the effects of self-awareness in CMC. To fill this void, this study examined the effects of individuals’ public and private self-awareness in anonymous, time-restricted, and synchronous CMC. Two experiments were conducted. A pilot experiment tested and confirmed the effectiveness of using a Web camera combined with an alleged online audience to enhance users’ public self-awareness. In the main study users’ private and public self-awareness were manipulated in a crossed 2 × 2 factorial design. Pairs of participants completed a Desert Survival Problem via a synchronous, text-only chat program. After the task, they evaluated each other on intimacy, task/social orientation, formality, politeness, attraction, and group identification. The results suggest that a lack of private and public self-awareness does not automatically lead to impersonal tendencies in CMC as deindividuation perspectives of CMC would argue. Moreover, participants in this study were able to form favorable impressions in a completely anonymous environment based on brief interaction, which lends strong support to the idealization proposed by hyperpersonal theory. Findings are used to modify and extend current theoretical perspectives on CMC.