Online avatar holds clues about personality

Your online avatar may give accurate information about your personality, especially how outgoing or anxious you are, a new study suggests.

Researchers at York University, Canada, looked at what personality traits are conveyed by a user’s avatar, an image that represents the self in a virtual world.

They found that some personality traits are accurately communicated better than others through a person’s online avatar.

It was easier to perceive how outgoing or anxious a person is based on an avatar compared to how open to new experiences or conscientious the person is, researchers said.

Outgoing and sociable individuals tend to create avatars that communicate their personality. In contrast, people who are high in neuroticism tend to create avatars that don’t communicate their personality accurately.

An avatar can range from simple drawings (eg, Mii characters on Nintendo Wii) to detailed three-dimensional renderings of characters (eg, World of Warcraft).

Avatars allow individuals to express, or suppress, various physical or psychological traits in a digital world. Previous research has shown that individuals typically choose and prefer avatars perceived to be similar to themselves.

The researchers included two components of profile similarity in their analysis — overall accuracy and distinctive accuracy.

Overall accuracy is how well personality can be predicted as a whole, and is the sum of both distinctive accuracy and expectations based on typical norms. “For example, if my perception of someone’s extraversion closely matches their true level of extraversion, without any reference to how this related to average levels of extraversion, this is overall accuracy,” said lead researcher Katrina Fong.