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Gauging the Competition: Understanding Social Comparison and Anxiety through Eye-tracking in Virtual Reality Group Interview

Shi-Ting Ni, Kairong Fang, Yuyang Wang, Pan Hui

TL;DR

The paper tackles how social comparison unfolds in immersive VR group interviews and its effects on anxiety and self-evaluation. It amplia presents a controlled VR-interview system with eye-tracking, manipulating peer signals via hand-raising and public scores across two rounds. The findings show that more hand-raisers heighten attention to comparison cues and can lower self-concept consistent with the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect, while objective scores intensify comparison yet can stabilize self-evaluation. These insights inform the design of psychologically-aware VR interview environments for training and talent selection, suggesting realistic cues and optional objective benchmarks to manage anxiety and self-assessment.

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising tool for interview training, yet the psychological dynamics of group interviews, such as social comparison, remain underexplored. We investigate this phenomenon by developing an immersive VR group interview system and conducting an eye-tracking study with 73 participants. We manipulated peer performance using ambiguous behavioral cues (e.g., hand-raising) and objective information (public test scores) to measure their effect on participants' attention and self-concept. Our results demonstrate a "Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect" in VR: an increase in high-achieving peer behaviors heightened participants' processing of social comparison information and significantly lowered their self-assessments. The introduction of objective scores further intensified these comparative behaviors. We also found that lower perceived realism of the VR environment correlated with higher anxiety. These findings offer key insights and design considerations for creating more effective and psychologically-aware virtual training environments that account for complex social dynamics.

Gauging the Competition: Understanding Social Comparison and Anxiety through Eye-tracking in Virtual Reality Group Interview

TL;DR

The paper tackles how social comparison unfolds in immersive VR group interviews and its effects on anxiety and self-evaluation. It amplia presents a controlled VR-interview system with eye-tracking, manipulating peer signals via hand-raising and public scores across two rounds. The findings show that more hand-raisers heighten attention to comparison cues and can lower self-concept consistent with the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect, while objective scores intensify comparison yet can stabilize self-evaluation. These insights inform the design of psychologically-aware VR interview environments for training and talent selection, suggesting realistic cues and optional objective benchmarks to manage anxiety and self-assessment.

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising tool for interview training, yet the psychological dynamics of group interviews, such as social comparison, remain underexplored. We investigate this phenomenon by developing an immersive VR group interview system and conducting an eye-tracking study with 73 participants. We manipulated peer performance using ambiguous behavioral cues (e.g., hand-raising) and objective information (public test scores) to measure their effect on participants' attention and self-concept. Our results demonstrate a "Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect" in VR: an increase in high-achieving peer behaviors heightened participants' processing of social comparison information and significantly lowered their self-assessments. The introduction of objective scores further intensified these comparative behaviors. We also found that lower perceived realism of the VR environment correlated with higher anxiety. These findings offer key insights and design considerations for creating more effective and psychologically-aware virtual training environments that account for complex social dynamics.
Paper Structure (20 sections, 6 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 20 sections, 6 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Consistency between VR and Real-World Social Interactions
  4. Feasibility of VR in Symptom Management
  5. Social Anxiety and Social Comparison
  6. Method
  7. Experiment setup
  8. Experiment condition
  9. Platform development
  10. User Study
  11. Participants
  12. Measurement
  13. Experiment procedure
  14. Results
  15. Data pre-processing
  16. ...and 5 more sections

Figures (6)

  • Figure 1: Immersive virtual reality scenes corresponding to the Round 1 (top) and Round 2 (bottom) quick-response sessions under the three experimental conditions.
  • Figure 2: Capturing participants' gaze targets by setting up colliders (based on the researcher's perspective).
  • Figure 3: Real shots of the interview process, with the left side showing the resting state and the right side showing the hand-raising quick-response state.
  • Figure 4: Flowchart of user study; the three colors successively represent the before, during, and after stages of the experiment, totaling 7 steps.
  • Figure 5: Interaction diagram analysis results (top) and box diagram (bottom) of Anova. Both of the independent variables have significant influences on gaze duration (log) and gaze frequency (log), and the cross terms of the independent variables have significant influences on pupil diameter (log) and self-concept. Independent variables had no significant effect on gaze number.
  • ...and 1 more figures