Judging yourself by appearances
They say you can't judge a book by its cover - an exhortation against judging the character of people based on factors they have no control over. Nonetheless, people do do it, and frequently.
There are some interesting aspects to this. One is that we judge ourselves this way. The other comes when we can choose those covers - for example, our avatars.
In the physical world, we power-dress, we dress-for-success, we craft visual identities based on celebrities on television, in movies, in books and in magazines. Power dressing was more about how the outfit made you feel, and the way that shifted your psychology and affected your interactions with the people around you than strictly with how you were judged visually by others.
It isn't surprising that the word 'avatar' cropped up associated with these concepts among personal image consultants in the seventies and eighties - your selection of hair, makeup, clothing, shoes, even postural and speaking-styles were supposed to be an embodiment - of power, success, sexuality, vulnerability, confidence or charm. Whatever you chose to project.
Shamans, priests, hermetics and mystics of many stripes have been doing this sort of thing for more than the length of recorded human history. The practice is called the assumption of godforms. Avatars, again.
Stanford University has recently been studying the phenomenon as it pertains to synthetic avatars. Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee call it "the Proteus effect" - after the Greek god who was said to spend a chunk of his time changing his shape at will.
Bailenson and Yee have experimentally demonstrated that the appearance of our avatars in virtual worlds do (as we have previously observed) has subtle effects on our behavior, and psychology - just as our clothing-choices do in the physical world.
In the experiments at Stanford, users reacted differently based on the relative height and attractiveness of their avatars (mirroring what happens to us when we dress differently or wear lower or higher heeled shoes), and just as with physical appearance changes, these lasted for a while after the user stopped using the avatar and resumed normal physical activities.
While this might excite some people who are keen to associate violence with video-games, the simple fact is that you'd have to be woefully fanatical to make that connection. Using this effect to link video games to acts of violence would be like saying that smoking jackets cause iconoclasm. This is a far more subtle and interesting psychological effect, and one that hitherto we suspected but had not scientifically demonstrated to work without the tangibility of the physical world.
After being randomly assigned either an attractive or a plain avatar for a round of testing, subjects who had been assigned attractive avatars continued to exhibit higher levels of self-confidence in subsequent, non-virtual testing than those who had been assigned less-attractive avatars during the round of tests.
We already know both anecdotally and by direct experience that avatars can be useful therapeutic devices. Now we have the study to back that up.
