The Hidden Face of the Proteus Effect: Deindividuation, Embodiment and Identification

Abstract

The Proteus effect describes how users of virtual environments adjust their attitudes to match stereotypes associated with their avatar's appearance. While numerous studies have demonstrated this phenomenon's reliability, its underlying processes remain poorly understood. This work investigates deindividuation's hypothesized but unproven role within the Proteus effect. Deindividuated individuals tend to follow situational norms rather than personal ones. Therefore, together with high embodiment and identification processes, deindividuation may lead to a stronger Proteus effect. We present two experimental studies. First, we demonstrated the emergence of the Proteus effect in a real-world academic context: engineering students got better scores in a statistical task when embodying Albert Einstein's avatar compared to a control one. In the second study, we tested the role of deindividuation by manipulating participants' exposure to different identity cues during the task. While we could not find a significant effect of deindividuation on the participants' performance, our results highlight an unexpected pattern, with embodiment as a negative predictor and identification as a positive predictor of performance. These results open avenues for further research on the processes involved in the Proteus effect, particularly those focused on the relation between the avatar and the nature of the task to be performed. All supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/au3wk/.