The present paper focuses on the influence of avatar creation in a video game. More specifically, this study investigates the effects of avatar creation on attitude towards avatar, empathy, presence, and para-social interaction of female non-game users. As a cyber-self, an avatar is a graphic character representing a user in cyberspace. Avatars are primarily used in the entertainment industry as high-tech novelties, controlled by game users, for high-end video games. Some games provide game characters by default that users cannot change, but other games provide various options gamers can choose. What if game users can create their own avatars? Do they have more psychological closeness with their avatars as their cyber-selves? This study tested the differences of attitude, empathy, presence, and para-social interaction of female non-game users between an avatar creation group and a non-avatar creation group and resulted in no difference.

No abstract

A puzzling finding from research on strategical decision making concerns the effect that predictions have on future actions. Simply stating a prediction about an opponent changes the total probability (pooled over predictions) of a player taking a future action compared to not stating any prediction. This is called an interference effect. We first review five different findings of interference effects from past empirical work using the prisoner's dilemma game. Then we report interference effects obtained from a new experiment in which 493 participants played a six-stage centipede game against a computer agent. During the first stage of the game, the total probability following prediction for cooperation was higher than making a decision alone; during later stages, the total probability following prediction for cooperation was lower than making a decision alone. These interference effects are difficult to explain using traditional economic models, and instead these results suggest turning to a quantum cognition approach to strategic decision making. Toward this end, we develop a belief-action entanglement model that provides a good account of the empirical results.