Thesis title: Changing the body to change the mind: Evidence of the Proteus effect in immersive virtual environments
Technological advancement allows people to experience the illusion of embodying virtual
agents (avatars), i.e., fully detailed virtual bodies which researchers create at their own
convenience. In fact, through immersive virtual reality people can feel they own virtual
bodies as if they were their own, a phenomenon commonly known as the body ownership
illusion (or embodiment illusion). Just as in the real world, in the virtual environments
people use their (virtual) bodies to interact with physical and social targets. Crucially,
previous works observed that the avatar appearance affects people’s attitudes,
perception, and behaviours, making them act accordingly to the virtual body physical
features. The authors who first revealed the phenomenon referred it as the Proteus effect,
alluding to the ability of the Greek God Proteus to change his shape at will. Several
researchers then supported and expanded Proteus effect results in different domains, by
making progress in creating increasingly detailed and distinctive avatars. Exemplary
avatars are those that resemble Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, the embodiment of
which seemed to lead to cognitive and mood enhancement, respectively. Differently from
other studies, these two avatars represent role-models, characters with salient traits that
seemed to be assimilated by participants during the virtual experience in their shoes.
Despite the growing interest in the field, the Proteus effect needs further investigations to
discover to what extent and for which domains it works. Moreover, embodying rolemodels and the transformative effects that follow stand out as one of the most recent and
interesting related-challenges. Hence, this work aimed at taking steps in this direction.
In this dissertation, we discuss the results of three studies and present materials and
methods of two ongoing experiments. In four out of five studies presented, we explored
behavioural, physiological, attitudinal effects of virtually being the Christian God, whose
avatar was validated through two online pilot studies. We first examined if such an avatar
might influence people’s sense of invulnerability (Study 1) and power (Study 2), and we
found positive evidence at both physiological and behavioural level. Secondly, we
investigated the embodiment effect on moral conflict resolution (Study 3), and we found
no significant effect driven by the avatar embodied. We speculated that the lack of effects
was due to the type of task and measures employed. We presented an ongoing study
(Study 4) whereby we used an alternative version of the task. Finally, we presented an
ongoing study (Study 5) whereby we aimed at exploring transformative effects of virtually
being a successful female role-model, i.e., Angela Merkel, whose selection and avatar
validation was made through two online pilot studies.