Avatar-mediated creativity: When embodying inventors makes engineers more creative

An important challenge today is to support creativity while enabling geographically distant people to work together. In line with the componential theory of creativity, self-perception theory and recent research on the Proteus Effect, we investigate how avatars, which are virtual representations of the self, may be a medium for stimulating creativity. For this purpose, we conducted two studies with a population of engineering students. In the first study, 114 participants responded to online surveys in order to identify what a creative avatar may look like. This enabled us to select avatars representing inventors, which were perceived as creative by engineering students, and neutral avatars. In the second study, 54 participants brainstormed in groups of 3, in 3 different conditions: in a control face-to-face situation, in a virtual environment while embodying neutral avatars and in a virtual environment with inventor avatars. The results show that inventor avatars led to higher performance in fluency and originality of ideas. Moreover, this benefit proved to endure over time since participants allocated to inventor avatars also performed better in a subsequent face-to-face brainstorming. The prospects of using avatars for enhancing creativity-relevant processes are discussed in terms of theoretical and applicative implications.