Gender stereotyping over instant messenger: The effects of gender and context

Christofides, Emily; Islam, Tarikul; Desmarais, Serge

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2009.03.004

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Alternatively, some popular online platforms such as Google use user-specific avatars with user initials to represent them. The user representations used in this study are purposefully devoid of explicit user cues (such as gender, name, or age) to avoid confounding effects on online social conformity [12,32,35,36,39,67].…”

Section: User Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the Effect of Social Presence on Online Social Conformity

Wijenayake

Berkel

Kostakos

et al. 2020

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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Social conformity occurs when individuals in group settings change their personal opinion to be in agreement with the majority's position. While recent literature frequently reports on conformity in online group settings, the causes for online conformity are yet to be fully understood. This study aims to understand how social presencei.e., the sense of being connected to others via mediated communication, influences conformity among individuals placed in online groups while answering subjective and objective questions. Acknowledging its multifaceted nature, we investigate three aspects of online social presence: user representation (generic vs.user-specific avatars), interactivity (discussion vs.no discussion ), and response visibility (public vs.private ). Our results show an overall conformity rate of 30% and main effects from task objectivity, group size difference between the majority and the minority, and self-confidence on personal answer. Furthermore, we observe an interaction effect between interactivity and response visibility, such that conformity is highest in the presence of peer discussion and public responses, and lowest when these two elements are absent. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our findings in designing online group settings, accounting for the effects of social presence on conformity.

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Section: User Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the Effect of Social Presence on Online Social Conformity

Wijenayake

Berkel

Kostakos

et al. 2020

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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“…Avatar gender was chosen as the diagnostic variable, because it is accessible without further analysis, and because gender has time and again been shown to be an important structural variable (Räsänen, 2008a; on the significance of gender roles in online communication, see e.g. Christofides, Islam and Desmarais, 2009). If the sampling is representative, the gender distribution of the avatars present in the data should correspond to the gender distribution of the avatars in the back-end data.…”

Section: Comparing the Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collecting conversations: three approaches to obtaining user-to-user communications data from virtual environments

Lehdonvirta¹,

Lehdonvirta²,

Baba³

2011

JVWR

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Transcripts of conversations are a valuable research resource in social sciences and can be used to make inferences about subjects’ behaviour and intentions. Large-scale communications records can be coded and analysed statistically for generalisable results. Virtual environments are a good place to gather communications records, because they exhibit a wide variety of subject behaviours. However, compared to traditional channels such as forums and chat rooms, virtual environments can be more challenging to obtain data from. In this article, we describe three approaches to collecting user-to-user communications data from virtual environments: requesting back-end records from the operator of the environment, recruiting “data donors” among the users, and setting up researchers’ own “listening posts”. The data collection approaches are evaluated empirically in Uncharted Waters Online, a Japanese massively-multiplayer game. Avatar gender ratio is used as a diagnostic variable to compare the representativeness of the resulting data sets. Both data donors and listening posts yielded data with a gender ratio that corresponds to the back-end records, but the back-end gender ratios differed significantly between two different servers. We conclude that all three approaches can be statistically viable: the choice of method depends more on desired sampling scope and on practical factors such as resources and timetable; but when defining a sampling frame, it cannot be assumed that one server is necessarily representative of the whole platform.

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“…Factors influencing online help-seeking behavior, and particularly the role of gender in online help-seeking behavior, remain mostly unexplored. Contrary to some expectations, the impact of gender has not disappeared in computer-mediated communications (Christofides, Islam, & Desmarais, 2009;Leonard, 2006). Gender is such a fundamental way of organizing social reality that it is even attributed to supposedly gender-neutral computer agents (Nass & Moon, 2000;Nass, Moon, & Green, 1997).…”

Section: Gender and Help Seeking In Computer-mediated Communicationmentioning

confidence: 92%

The Stoic Male

et al. 2012

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Men are more reluctant to seek help for their problems than women. This difference is attributed to social expectations regarding the male gender role. Today, helpseeking is moving online: instead of traditional peer groups and counselors, people depend on online communities and e-counselors. But online users can appear in guises that differ from their physical sex. An empirical study was conducted in an online game to examine whether users' avatars' gender influences how they seek and receive help. Analysis is based on user-to-user communications and backend data. Results indicate that male avatars are less likely to receive sought-for help than female avatars and more likely to be the recipients of indirectly sought help. The authors conclude that avatar gender influences help seeking independent of physical sex: Men overcome their inhibition for help seeking when using female avatars. Practitioners should ensure that means for indirect help seeking are available in order not to exclude male-pattern help seekers.

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Gender stereotyping over instant messenger: The effects of gender and context

Cited by 20 publications

References 18 publications

Quantifying the Effect of Social Presence on Online Social Conformity

Quantifying the Effect of Social Presence on Online Social Conformity

Collecting conversations: three approaches to obtaining user-to-user communications data from virtual environments

The Stoic Male

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