Race in virtual environments: competitive versus cooperative games with black or white avatars

Often, virtual environments and video games have established goals, and to achieve them, users must either compete or cooperate with others. The common ingroup identity model predicts that individuals maintain multiple identities at any given time based on roles, demographics, and contextual factors, and that they interpret others based on similarity (i.e., perceived ingroup) or dissimilarity (i.e., perceived outgroup) to these identities. In this experiment, we manipulated two aspects of a virtual partner's identity-race and task collaboration-to determine how users would perceive others in a virtual world. White participants (N=99) played an anagram game competitively (outgroup) or cooperatively (ingroup) in a virtual environment with a black (outgroup) or white (ingroup) virtual partner. Contrary to hypotheses, performing either task led to more positive evaluations of black avatars than white avatars.