Jan 24, 2011 19:01 GMT  ·  By

Experts at the Stanford University are conducting experiments for determining how owning an avatar online changes people in real-life. The studies are conducted at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), a research group set up for this specific purpose.

The basic premise of these investigations is that owning an avatar on the Internet has an influence on how people behave in real life as well. This happens regardless of the fact that an avatar is just a virtual identity that people take on to represent themselves in cyberspace.

“In this world of new media, people spend a lot of time interacting with digital versions of one another,” says expert Jeremy Bailenson on the rational behind the founding of the VHIL.

The scientist is an associate professor of communication at Stanford, and also the director of the Interaction Lab. He explains that avatars started out as something people used for fun and games, but adds that things have since changed.

The VHIL was founded at the university with money provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). “As a lab, we've gone a bit out on a limb and argued that the reason you have an avatar is because an avatar makes you more human than human,” Bailenson explains.

“It gives you the ability to do things you could never do in the physical world. You can be 10 years younger. You can swap your gender. You can be 30 pounds heavier or lighter,” he adds.

“Any behavior or appearance you can imagine, you can transform your avatar to embody,” the expert goes on to say. In some cases, people design their avatars to represents the best that they could be.

The question the Lab is trying to answer is whether and when the virtual reality persona begins to influence the real life persona of an individual, as well as his or her personality.

And Bailenson says that examples of how avatars influence people of all ages abound. “I use algorithms to age a 20-year-old undergraduate's avatar and then I give that undergraduate the opportunity to save money or to spend it frivolously,” he exemplifies.

“The undergraduate will put more money in savings as opposed to go out and spend it on partying,” he continues. This can be interpreted as being the influence of the older-looking avatar.

The VHIL director says that owning a slimmer and fitter avatar has been proven to make people want to slim down even more, and remain dedicated to this activity over time.

“So, the power comes from seeing yourself in the third person gaining and losing weight in accordance with your own physical behavior,” the investigator argues.

“Twenty-four hours later, people exercised more after being exposed to watching themselves run than watching someone else run,” he concludes.