In organizational and team decision-making, it is critical for each member to engage in discussions from a broader perspective, without fixating on personal values and knowledge. Self-distancing has been proposed as a means of supporting such a perspective; however, its role in multiparty group discussions with decision-making remains underexplored. We applied self-distancing to immersive virtual environments to examine its effects on group decision-making. A total of 144 participants (48 triads, aged 20–49) experienced two types of decision-making tasks under either a self-distanced perspective, observing their self-avatar from behind, or a self-immersed perspective, observing it from the first person. The results showed that embodied self-distancing significantly affected decision-making quality (improved consensus agreement and opinion inference accuracy), communication behavior (increased gestures regulating conversational flow), and group members’ perceptions (reduced intragroup conflict and affective interdependence). Overall, embodied self-distancing may be suitable for situations that require the prevention or mitigation of conflict but less suitable for situations that require empathy and attentive listening.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems