The Influence Of Avatar,Situational Risk And Interpersonal Distance On Helping Behavior In Online Games

Nowadays,with the development of mobile Internet technology,people can easily play multi-player video games with their friends around the world.In multi-player games,players can choose to "team up" with other players.This change of interactive mode leads to frequent helping behaviors within the game.Helping behavior,refers to the additional rewards without prior commitment in return,be beneficial to the behavior of others,including sharing,aid,support,donations,etc.Helping behavior has always been an important research field in psychology.A large number of scholars have discussed the occurrence and development mechanism of helping in real situations and reached many important conclusions.However,the network situation has many characteristics such as anonymity and immateriality,and many classic research conclusions are difficult to explain the behavior of Internet users.Therefore,this study focuses on the helping behavior mechanism in the cooperative context of online games.On the one hand,it discusses how the factors affecting helping in reality play a role in the virtual game world;on the other hand,it discusses how the avatar effect in the online context affects helping behavior.The study selected 267 college and graduate students,including 131 boys and 136 girls.Using experimental method,for the 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 mixed design of four factors,the independent variables are respectively the participants embodiment gender(male,female),gender(male,female),situational risk(general situation,risk situation),interpersonal distance(far,near),the embodiment of gender for variable,in the subjects were gender,situational variables between risk and interpersonal distance as the subjects.The dependent variable is the score of the participants' willingness to help their partners in the game.The results showed :(1)the risk of the helping situation significantly affects the helping behavior of the players in the game,specifically,the helping behavior of the players in the low-risk situation is significantlyhigher than that in the high-risk situation.(2)the interpersonal distance between the player and the patient significantly affects the player's helping behavior in the game,specifically,the player's helping behavior towards the close interpersonal distance teammate is significantly higher than that towards the far interpersonal distance teammate.(3)in the low-risk situation,when facing teammates with long interpersonal distance,the level of helping others in the game with female avatars was significantly higher than that with male avatars.(4)in the low-risk situation,female subjects' helping level is higher than that of male subjects;In high-risk situations,men were more helpful than women.The conclusion shows that the helping behavior of online games is indeed affected by the avatar effect.Under certain conditions,the helping level of players using female avatars is significantly higher than that of male avatars.In addition,as an important factor affecting realistic helping behaviors,situational risk and interpersonal distance also play an important role in online game situations.