Positive Technology Journal

Nick Yee and colleagues at Stanford University have investigated whether social behavior and norms in virtual environments are comparable to those in the physical world. To this end, they collected data from avatars in Second Life, in order to explore whether social norms of gender, interpersonal distance (IPD), and eye gaze transfer into virtual environments even though the modality of movement is entirely different.

"Results showed that established findings of IPD and eye gaze transfer into virtual environments: 1) Malemale dyads have larger IPDs than female-female dyads, 2) male-male dyads maintain less eye contact than female-female dyads, and 3) decreases in IPD are compensated with gaze avoidance"

According to Yee and coll., these findings suggest that social interactions in online virtual environments are governed by the same social norms as social interactions in the physical world.