Print Email Facebook Twitter Virtual bystanders in a language lesson: Examining the effect of social evaluation, vicarious experience, cognitive consistency and praising on students' beliefs, self-efficacy and anxiety in a virtual reality environment Title Virtual bystanders in a language lesson: Examining the effect of social evaluation, vicarious experience, cognitive consistency and praising on students' beliefs, self-efficacy and anxiety in a virtual reality environment Author Qu, C. Ling, Y. Heynderickx, I. Brinkman, W.P. Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Intelligent Systems Date 2015-04-17 Abstract Bystanders in a real world's social setting have the ability to influence people’s beliefs and behavior. This study examines whether this effect can be recreated in a virtual environment, by exposing people to virtual bystanders in a classroom setting. Participants (n = 26) first witnessed virtual students answering questions from an English teacher, after which they were also asked to answer questions from the teacher as part of a simulated training for spoken English. During the experiment the attitudes of the other virtual students in the classroom was manipulated; they could whisper either positive or negative remarks to each other when a virtual student was talking or when a participant was talking. The results show that the expressed attitude of virtual bystanders towards the participants affected their selfefficacy, and their avoidance behavior. Furthermore, the experience of witnessing bystanders commenting negatively on the performance of other students raised the participants’ heart rate when it was their turn to speak. Two-way interaction effects were also found on self-reported anxiety and self-efficacy. After witnessing bystanders’ positive attitude towards peer students, participants’ self-efficacy when answering questions received a boost when bystanders were also positive towards them, and a blow when bystanders reversed their attitude by being negative towards them. Still, inconsistency, instead of consistency, between the bystanders’ attitudes towards virtual peers and the participants was not found to result in a larger change in the participants’ beliefs. Finally the results also reveal that virtual flattering or destructive criticizing affected the participants’ beliefs not only about the virtual bystanders, but also about the neutral teacher. Together these findings show that virtual bystanders in a classroom can affect people’s beliefs, anxiety and behavior. Subject teachersheart ratebehavioranxietyanalysis of varianceskin physiologyquestionnairesvirtual realityOA-Fund TU Delft To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:23ac1f4f-6d96-4805-a9a6-de42bed54d21 Publisher Public Library of Science PLOS ISSN 1932-6203 Source https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0125279 Source PloS One, 10 (4), 2015 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2015 Qu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Files PDF virtual_bystanders.pdf 4.91 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:23ac1f4f-6d96-4805-a9a6-de42bed54d21/datastream/OBJ/view