Mitigating Impacts of Appearance-Based Social Cues to Facilitate Balanced Participation in Virtual Environments Across Age and Gender.

As the importance of innovation increases, generating innovative ideas through the balanced participation of individuals from diverse backgrounds has become a challenge for organizations. However, groups composed of members with diverse backgrounds can be susceptible to the effects of social categorization based on social cues, which can lead to the suppression of balanced participation. Previous CMC studies suggest that avatar-mediated communication could be a promising approach to mitigate these effects. Still, this has not been fully explored. We experimented with 16 groups of four people of different ages and genders in this study. We divided them into two conditions: (1) avatars with social cues of appearance, in which group members’ social cues of appearance are maintained, and (2) avatars without social cues of appearance, in which group members’ social cues of appearance are removed. The results showed that, unlike the avatars with social cues of appearance, avatars without social cues of appearance improved both objective balance of participation and subjective balance of social influence.