The joint influence of social status and personal attitudes in a contact and open versus a noncontact and homophobic cul
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The joint influence of social status and personal attitudes in a contact and open versus a noncontact and homophobic culture on the virtual Midas touch Justyna Świdrak1,2 · Grzegorz Pochwatko1 · Xavi Navarro2 · Laura Osęka1 · Dariusz Doliński3 Received: 5 December 2018 / Accepted: 19 December 2019 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Alongside the highly rapid development of virtual reality technology, embodied agents will become soon a common element of human–computer interactions. Our study analyzed the interactional influence of social status, personal attitudes (homophobia and social status importance), and culture on the efficiency of the virtual Midas touch effect. From a human perspective, we focused on the cultural background related to the social norms of touch, homophobia, and social status importance. In Poland, a noncontact culture, men avoid same-gender touch and also score very high on male homophobia. Catalonia, on the other hand, has a contact culture, where same-gender male touch is rather common and natural. Catalonia is also one of the most inclusive and open societies in the world. From an embodied agent’s perspective, we asked whether the agent’s social status influences compliance with virtual touch. We used a modified paradigm of the ultimatum game to observe whether Polish and Catalan men are more compliant when touched by high- or low-status agents. Our results suggest that the virtual interpersonal touch and social status importance influence compliance with a moderating effect of culture. We found also a significant effect of the offer’s value and a moderating effect of culture and homophobia on compliance. Keywords Midas touch · Ultimatum game · Immersive virtual reality · Social status · Homophobia · Culture
1 Introduction Immersive virtual reality (IVR) has arisen as a new, extremely powerful tool for education, medicine, real estate, marketing, and gaming industry worldwide (Uppot et al. 2019; Joda et al. 2019). With dynamically increasing accessibility and technological advancement of head-mounted displays come a growing number of applications aimed at a wide range of users. Previously, agents and avatars were of low resolution, schematic, and minimally responsive. Nowadays, embodied agents (EAs) can take a form of highly * Justyna Świdrak [email protected] 1
Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
2
Experimental Virtual Environments for Neuroscience and Technology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
3
Faculty of Psychology in Wroclaw, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Wrocław, Poland
anthropomorphic entities powered by advanced artificial intelligence algorithms (Weitz et al. 2019). As a result, an international, rapidly growing community of IVR users has started to interact regularly with more and more intelligent and versatile EAs, some barely distinguishable from avatars controlled by real humans. Therefore, rich social i
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