Individual Differences and Contextual Influences on Group Behavior in Virtual Reality: An Exploratory Person-Environment Interactionist Perspective

In virtual reality (VR), people can transform both who and where they are with the touch of a button. While many studies have examined each of these factors individually, few have examined how they interact. Person-environment (P-E) effects are critical to investigate because they can help scholars understand meaningful social and behavioral dynamics like group cohesion (e.g., entitativity), non-verbal social behaviors (e.g., social attention), and simulator sickness. We analyzed participant data from a large university course conducted in VR to understand how the interaction of individual level variables (e.g., personality) and environment level variables (e.g., the setting, spaciousness of the virtual environment) associated with such dynamics. A limited number of P-E effects emerged, including the idea that people high on extraversion in a panoramic environment reported the greatest entitativity. Implications of this interactionist perspective for exploratory social VR research, plus practical implications for collaboration in VR, are discussed.