Self-Distancing Through a Third-Person Avatar

"Look at your problem as if it were someone else's, and an unexpected solution comes into view" — this is a well-known phenomenon in psychology: putting psychological distance between yourself and a problem (self-distancing) has been shown to support insight and creative problem solving. People tend to come up with more objective, more creative solutions to other people's troubles than to their own.

Background

In VR, you can control your own avatar from a third-person perspective — looking down from behind or diagonally above, almost like an out-of-body experience. This study began with the hypothesis that this experience of operating your avatar while viewing it from the outside might create psychological distance similar to self-distancing, and thereby benefit problem solving.

Research Question

Does controlling one's own avatar in VR from a third-person perspective, compared with a first-person perspective, create psychological distance and improve performance on tasks that require insight and creativity?

Methods

We conducted an experiment in which participants worked on both insight tasks and creativity tasks. There were two conditions: controlling one's avatar from a "first-person perspective," and controlling it from a "third-person perspective," viewing it from the outside. Participants solved the same tasks under the different perspective conditions, and we measured psychological distance and compared task performance.

Findings

The third-person perspective condition increased psychological distance compared with the first-person condition, and produced higher performance on the insight tasks. On the other hand, no significant difference between perspectives was found in the "quantity" of creative ideas. These results suggest that in VR interface design, perspective manipulation could serve as a design tool for shaping psychological distance.