Avatars may improve health and exercise behaviours

 Creating an online avatar that better resembles its human user may lead to improved health and exercise behaviours, researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have found.

"There's an emerging body of research that suggests that avatars in virtual environments are an effective way to encourage people to be more healthy," said T Franklin Waddell, a doctoral candidate in mass communications at the Pennsylvania State University in US.

"What our study was trying to do was finding out why avatars have these effects and also to determine if avatars can encourage people to be healthy, particularly encourage those who might have rather low interest in exercising and healthy eating," said Waddell.
In a study, people who customised their avatars to match their offline gender - a task the researchers used to test the similarity of the avatar - were more likely to have better exercise intentions and choose better health behaviours than ones who created an avatar of the opposite sex, researchers said.

After customising their avatars, both people who were already health-conscious and those who were less likely to think about health chose healthier intentions, such as selecting coupons for a fitness club rather than coupons for a fast food restaurant, as compensation for customising their avatars.

"Our other research has shown that customising avatars can make users feel more agentic and take charge of their welfare," said S Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State.

"This study shows that even individuals who are not normally health-conscious are motivated by customising a same-sex avatar to better take care of their health," said Sundar.

The act of customising an avatar seems to create a personal connection between people and their virtual alter egos and sticks with them in real life, he said.

"Perhaps more important, there is the sense of agency we get from being able to shape our online persona," Sundar said.

"This agentic feeling transfers over to our offline motivations and actions," he said.
Waddell said that online health and diet counsellors could one day use this avatar customisation technique to reinforce advice and treatment for their clients.

The researchers recruited 132 students from a university to customise an avatar in Second Life, a popular virtual reality environment that allows users to customise their avatars in a number of ways.

The participants were then assigned to build either a same-sex avatar, or an opposite sex avatar. Another group of participants could see their own image on a small separate screen as they customised their avatar.

The researchers used the customisation of the gender of an avatar as a way of modifying self-awareness and a sense of control without hinting that health was the focus of the study, Waddell added.

The study was published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking.