ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Stereotype Threat in Virtual Learning Environments: Effects of Avatar Gender and Sexist Behavior on Women’s

Math Learning Outcomes

Felix Chang, BA,1 Mufan Luo, MA,2 Gregory Walton, PhD,1 Lauren Aguilar, PhD,1 and Jeremy Bailenson, PhD2

Abstract

Women in math, science, and engineering (MSE) often face stereotype threat: they fear that their performance in MSE will confirm an existing negative stereotype—that women are bad at math—which in turn may impair their learning and performance in math. This research investigated if sexist nonverbal behavior of a male instructor could activate stereotype threat among women in a virtual classroom. In addition, the research examined if learners’ avatar representation in virtual reality altered this nonverbal process. Specifically, a 2 (avatar gender: female vs. male) · 2 (instructor behavior: dominant sexist vs. nondominant or nonsexist) between-subjects experiment was used. Data from 76 female college students demonstrated that participants learned less and performed worse when interacting with a sexist male instructor compared with a nonsexist instructor in a virtual classroom. Participants learned and performed equally well when represented by female and male avatars. Our findings extend previous research in physical learning settings, suggesting that dominant-sexist behaviors may give rise to stereotype threat and undermine women’s learning outcomes in virtual classrooms. Implications for gender achievement gaps and stereotype threat are discussed.

Keywords: virtual reality, stereotype threat, social identity, virtual learning, gender

Introduction

Gender achievement gaps—the achievement differ-ences between male and female—are pervasive in the United States.1,2 The gap that favors men in math, science, and engineering (MSE) domains is particularly subject to intense scrutiny.1,2 Researchers believe that a primary psy- chological cause for women’s underperformance in math is stereotype threat, a form of cognitive burden that stems from concerns of being judged as less capable because of an in- dividual’s social identity.3 This study focuses on stereotype threat in virtual learning environments.

‘‘Women are bad at math’’ is a pervasive negative ste- reotype. Women majoring in MSE may experience stereo- type threat—the fear of being judged as poor in math ability because of this stereotype. Although a well-established lit- erature has suggested that stereotype threat hurts female learners’ learning and performance in physical MSE set- tings,4–10 it is important to examine if gender-based identity and stereotype threat plays out in virtual spaces, given the increasing use of virtual classrooms in math education.11

Virtual classrooms allow people to use avatars—digital

representations of themselves in computer-mediated com- munication12–as they learn. Therefore, it is important to in- vestigate the understudied phenomenon of how avatar embodiment of gender can affect people’s learning and performance in immersive virtual environments (IVEs).

This study aims to investigate (a) the effects of nonverbal behavior of a male instructor avatar on women’s math learning and performance, with dominant-sexist behavior as a threatening cue and (b) how avatar gender may moderate the stereotype threat effect in IVE. The insights obtained through the study enhance understanding of how stereotype threat manifests in virtual environments (VEs) and suggest avenues for future educational research or areas where in- tervention may be needed to promote equitable learning environments.

Effects of stereotype threat on learning and performance

Women often face reminders of the negative stereotype that their achievements in MSE will be worse than men; this threat in turn impairs their learning and performance

Departments of 1Psychology and 2Communication, Stanford University, Stanford, California.

CYBERPSYCHOLOGY, BEHAVIOR, AND SOCIAL NETWORKING Volume 22, Number 10, 2019 ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2019.0106

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in these fields. Well-established research on stereotype threat suggests that compared with nonstigmatized group members, stigmatized individuals facing a negative group stereotype tend to underperform in a variety of learning- related tasks such as working memory (i.e., temporary storage of information),13 learning (i.e., the ability to en- code math rules necessary to solve problems),6–8 and per- formance (i.e., the intellectual ability to accurately solve problems).9,10

A variety of situational cues in learning contexts can evoke stereotype threat, such as the salient representations of stereotypically masculine artifacts in the classroom (e.g., a Star Trek poster)14 and the representation of men in nu- merical majority of the group.15 Behavioral cues in social interactions have been shown to elicit stereotype threat as well. For example, women who interacted with a male partner with dominant and sexually interested behavior (i.e., looking at women’s bodies, sitting close to women with open body posture) experienced deficits in an engineering task.16

Van Loo and Rydell suggested that simply watching a video of another woman interacting with a sexist man reduced female viewers’ math performance.17 Furthermore, a field study found that professional female engineers who had negative work-related conversations with male colleagues on a given day experienced greater stereotype threat and burn- out later in the same day.18

Stereotype threat in IVE

VEs refer to sensory information that leads to perceptions of a synthetic environment as nonsynthetic.19 An IVE is one that presents a multisensory environment that responds to body movements, leading to greater psychological pres- ence.19 Virtual classrooms allow people to teach and learn a course in an IVE, providing more personalized and richer communication than other online educational technologies.19

As digital educational programs have been increasingly common in postsecondary education,20 it is important to understand how IVEs can change the social dynamics and outcomes of learning.

Previous research suggested that situational cues that trigger stereotype threat in physical settings have a similar effect in VEs. Cheryan et al. found that viewing a virtual computer science classroom that contained stereotypically masculine objects (e.g., science fiction books and electron- ics) reduced female students’ intentions to enroll in the class.21 In a virtual public speaking class, women spoke for a shorter amount of time than men when they were exposed to a picture of a male role model (e.g., Bill Clinton); this gender difference disappeared when a picture of a female role model (e.g., Hillary Clinton) was presented.22 Given that dominant- sexist behavior by men (i.e., looking at women’s bodies and sitting close to women with open body posture) has been shown to evoke stereotype threat in physical settings,17 we expected the same social dynamic to hold in IVE, where there is an additional experimental benefit in that the be- havior of a virtual male instructor avatar can be entirely programmed and thus controlled.23

H1: Dominant-sexist behavior from a male instructor will reduce women learners’ math learning and performance in IVE compared with a nonsexist instructor.

Effects of avatar gender representation

Although IVE provides behavioral cues likely to evoke stereotype threat just as in physical settings, they uniquely afford people the ability to dramatically alter self- presentation and self-identity through an avatar (i.e., digital portrayals of oneself).12 The Proteus effect is a prominent theory that suggests the cognitive and behavioral effects of avatar embodiment, which assumes that people think and behave in line with their avatars’ appearances and charac- teristics, regardless of their own self-identity.24,25 For ex- ample, participants represented with more attractive and taller avatars in IVE were more ‘‘intimate in self-disclosure and more confident in a negotiation task’’ than those re- presented with less attractive and shorter avatars.24 More specific to gender representation, research has shown that game players using female avatars performed more healing activities, whereas players using male avatars engaged in more aggressive combating activities, regardless of partici- pants’ actual gender.26 In a study using a computer screen display, participants who embodied a male avatar and com- peted against two female avatars performed better on an arithmetic task than participants embodied by a female av- atar competing against two male avatars.27

Drawing on the Proteus effect, avatar gender may moderate stereotype threat effects in virtual MSE learning environments. Female learners represented by male ava- tars may perceive the male avatar characteristics as rele- vant to self-concept and internalize the male identity, thereby being less susceptible to the threatening cues as- sociated with the negative stereotype about women dur- ing the learning session. Therefore, it is reasonable to predict that women represented by male avatars can learn and perform math tasks more successfully than those using female avatars in virtual classrooms where stereotype threat is induced.

However, stereotype activation theory provides an alter- native perspective on how avatar gender representation may affect stereotype threat effects.28 The theory suggests that physical traits (e.g., race and gender) can automatically ac- tivate stereotypes associated with the marginalized social groups. While virtual reality (VR) embodiment allows peo- ple to alter their digital identities (e.g., a woman can be embodied by a male avatar), altering gender—usually un- derstood to be a relatively stable physical trait—may only make it more salient, which in turn could further trigger stereotyped thoughts about the gender. In support of the activation hypothesis, Groom et al. found that people em- bodied by a black avatar (with head-tracking only) showed greater preference for white people than those embodied by a white avatar, regardless of participants’ race.29 Lopez et al. found that male participants embodied by a female avatar (with full-body tracking) in VR exhibited increased implicit gender bias, compared with those embodied by a male ava- tar.30 Therefore, representation by a male avatar in IVE could simply draw more attention to one’s female identity, especially in a negatively stereotyped scenario when inter- acting with a dominant-sexist male instructor. If so, body swapping could trigger greater stereotype threat and fur- ther undermine learning or performance among women embodying male avatars.

Given the competing hypotheses, we asked,

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