Virtual assessment of Interpersonal Predictors of Aggressive and Cooperative behavior (VIPAC)
Exploring the intersection of different theories from social psychology and cultural anthropology
The project VIPAC (Virtual assessment of Interpersonal Predictors of Aggressive and Cooperative behavior) aims to investigate aggressive and cooperative behavior in dyadic game interactions, thereby exploring the intersection of different theories from social psychology and cultural anthropology: aggression theory, social cognitive theory, and the theory of mimetic desire. These theories give different predictions on how players of competitive/collaborative games would be influenced by their opponents’ characteristics – especially for extreme levels of mutual visual similarity as achieved with virtual doppelgangers.
In the course of this Alliance-funded project, we successfully established an immersive virtual reality (VR) setup that extends current desktop PC environments for standardized interactions describable by game theory. Thanks to the funding, we were able to acquire suitable VR hardware and software, which we used to develop a competitive VR game to assess aggressive and cooperative behavior. In a first study, we tested the setup with volunteers who encountered their virtual doppelganger avatars in these games. Thanks to the Alliance funding, we were able to recruit over sixty participants, of which N=57 full data sets (with game behavior, questionnaire outcomes, eye-tracking data, heart rate and breathing rate data) are available to our ongoing quantitative analysis.
VIPAC Study: In an interactive foraging game, participants could collect apples while their
virtual doppelgangers were searching for pears – with players either competing or collaborating
with each other.