Experimenter bias: exploring the interaction between participant’s and investigator’s gender/sex in VR

This study explores the effect of the experimenter’s gender/sex and its interaction with the participant’s gender/sex as potential contributors to the replicability crisis, particularly in the man-gendered domain of VR. 75 young men and women from Western France were randomly evaluated by either a man or a woman during a 13-min immersion in a first-person shooter game. Self-administered questionnaires were used to measure variables commonly assessed during VR experiments (sense of presence, cybersickness, video game experience, flow). MANOVAs, ANOVAs and post-hoc comparisons were used. Results indicate that men and women differ in their reports of cybersickness and video game experience when rated by men, whereas they report similar measures when rated by women. These findings are interpreted as consequences of the psychosocial stress triggered by the interaction between the two genders/sexes, as well as the gender conformity effect induced, particularly in women, by the presence of a man in a masculine domain. Corroborating this interpretation, the subjective measure of flow, which is not linked to video games and/or computers, does not seem to be affected by this experimental effect. Methodological precautions are highlighted, notably the brief systematic description of the experimenter, and future exploratory and confirmatory studies are outlined.

Graphical abstract