What Your Online Avatar Says About Your Personality

Most people who go online to communicate with each other have some kind of avatar. Now, though, researchers have found what a person's online avatar says about their personality.

An avatar is typically an image that represents the self in a virtual world. This can range from simple drawings, such as Mii characters on Nintendo Wii, to detailed three-dimensional renderings of characters, such as on World of Warcraft. These avatars allow individuals to express, or suppress, various physical or psychological traits in the digital world.

In order to understand what types of personalities certain avatars convey, the researchers included two components of profile similarity in their analysis: overall accuracy and distinctive accuracy. Overall accuracy is how well personality can be predicted as a whole, and is the sum of both distinctive accuracy and expectations based on typical norms.

"For example, if my perception of someone's extraversion closely matches their true level of extraversion, without any reference to how this related to average levels of extraversion, this is overall accuracy," said Katrina Fong, the lead researcher, in a news release. "If I can accurately perceive how much more extraverted than average a person is, this involves distinctive accuracy."

Study participants created custom avatars. Then, a different set of participants viewed and rated the avatars created in the first phase.

So what did they find? It turns out that some personality traits are more accurately communicated than others. For instance, how outgoing or anxious a person was easy to perceive compared to how open to new experiences or how conscientious a person was.

Avatars with open eyes, a smile or grin, an oval face, brown hair and/or a sweater were more likely to elicit friendship intentions. In contrast, avatars with a neutral expression (or any other expression other than a smile), black hair, short hair, a hat and/or sunglasses were less likely to elicit friendship intentions. The scientists also found that female avatars were rated as more conscientious and open.

The findings reveal that avatars do have an influence on people's perceptions. However, researchers caution on extending these results to more complex and dynamic avatars.

The findings are published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

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