Kammler-Sücker K. Health + Life Science Alliance Heidelberg Mannheim : Virtual assessment of Interpersonal Predictors of Aggressive and Cooperative behavior. 10/2024.
VIPAC aims to investigate aggressive and cooperative behavior in dyadic game interactions, thereby exploring the intersection of different theories from social psychology and cultural anthropology: aggression theory, social cognitive theory, and the theory of mimetic desire. Its goal is to develop highly immersive virtual reality (VR) setups, extending current desktop PC environments for standardized interactions describable by game theory. There are different – and in parts conflicting – predictions on how the opponents’ characteristics would influence behavior in these highly realistic VR game situations, especially for extreme levels of mutual visual similarity as achieved with virtual doppelgangers. The proposed Tech!Explore phase of VIPAC aims at (1) developing hardware-software setups to assess aggressive and cooperative behavior in VR competitive games and (2) to pilot-test these with virtual doppelganger avatars of the respectively two players interacting with each other.