A certain intellectual tradition – Bourdieusian sociology – places the notion of habitus at the heart of its analyses: it is the result of the learning that an individual receives during their socialization and which shapes their perceptions, judgments and behaviors. No sociologist, whatever his programmatic sensitivity, doubts the influence that the social environment can have on an individual but not all accept the strong vision that Pierre Bourdieu had for whom the habitus represented the determinations collective which take place in an unconscious form and beyond the reach of the will of the subjects. In short, the human mind would be governed by blind causal mechanisms, by “a form of power which is exercised over bodies by relying on previously constituted predispositions which it triggers like springs”, as expressed by himself the former professor of the Collège de France.
Studies on the virtual reality allow us to revisit this key concept of sociology. The goal of the researchers who produced them, however, was not to upset Bourdieu’s mind. The discovery of what they called the Proteus effect is, however, likely to make us think about overly simplistic sociologizing interpretations. The effect takes its name from the shapeshifting god Proteus who provided a Latin radical for the origin of the term protean. What is it about? It was discovered in 2007 by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson, two researchers at Stanford University. They wondered if the shape of the avatars chosen in a virtual reality world could modify some of our dispositions? Jumbled together, the two researchers found that, depending on the physical appearance chosen, or even the size of the avatar, social behavior was different. Thus, a subject who embodied an attractive avatar tended to get physically closer to other avatars in the virtual world than he did with another type of identity: there was sometimes a difference of more than 1 meter!
Great identity plasticity
Even more interesting, in games that involved sharing a share of money, the amount each awarded to each other tended to be proportional to the size of the digital alter ego. Smaller avatars more easily tolerated unfair sharing to their disadvantage. This effect takes on an even more astonishing turn if we assume the appearance of a genius like Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed, a collective study showed that, when subjects who volunteered to immerse themselves in the virtual world took on this identity, they clearly demonstrated better creative and innovative abilities! Anatole Lecuyer, researcher at Inria, who participated in this study, emphasizes that we observe the same thing when it comes to embodying Albert Einstein. We then see that the subjects of the experiment increase their abilities to solve all kinds of cognitive tasks!
Virtual reality has also been used to assess the modification of stereotypes in an alternative world. Several studies have shown that when experimental subjects in the metaverse integrated a different body, in terms of gender, ethnicity as well as age, the prejudices associated with these characteristics tended to disappear very quickly. significantly.
Rather than having a magical interpretation, we can undoubtedly understand the Proteus effect as the integration of reciprocal social expectations which are linked to an appearance and the stereotypes attached to it. But the very possibility of this effect should also make us consider that the socialization processes which have precisely inscribed certain dispositions in our personality certainly do not resemble springs which would impose themselves on us without our being able to do much about it. The instantaneous nature of changes in the choices and preferences of subjects of the Proteus effect shows the existence of great identity plasticity. This places individuals at the crossroads of possibilities, rather than in an imaginary electromagnetic field where they are nothing more than iron filings.
* Gérald Bronner is a sociologist and professor at La Sorbonne University.
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