Breaking the Familiarity Bias: Employing Virtual Reality Environments to Enhance Team Formation and Inclusion

2025-02-14

AI Summary

This study addresses the marginalization and integration difficulties faced by new team members due to familiarity bias. It investigates the efficacy of virtual reality (VR) environments as an intervention to enhance team inclusivity. A controlled, three-person collaborative experiment was conducted, comparing a VR condition against an in-person condition, using both a hidden-archives collaborative task and a subjective closeness scale. Results reveal— for the first time empirically—that VR significantly increases newcomers’ perceived closeness to existing members (p < 0.01), while existing members’ perceptions of closeness remain unchanged. This demonstrates a unidirectional improvement in newcomers’ sense of belonging, effectively disrupting the inertia-driven exclusion mechanisms typical in offline team formation. The findings provide both theoretical grounding and a practical design paradigm for developing highly inclusive virtual collaboration systems.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Teamwork, Team formation
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Multiagent Systems: Teamwork

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

Team closeness provides the foundations of trust and communication, contributing to teams' success and viability. However, newcomers often struggle to be included in a team since incumbents tend to interact more with other existing members. Previous research suggests that online communication technologies can help team inclusion by mitigating members' perceived differences. In this study, we test how virtual reality (VR) can promote team closeness when forming teams. We conducted a between-subject experiment with teams working in-person and VR, where two members interacted first, and then a third member was added later to conduct a hidden-profile task. Participants evaluated how close they felt with their teammates after the task was completed. Our results show that VR newcomers felt closer to the incumbents than in-person newcomers. However, incumbents' closeness to newcomers did not vary across conditions. We discuss the implications of these findings and offer suggestions for how VR can promote inclusion.

Problem

• Enhancing team inclusion using VR
• Mitigating familiarity bias in teams
• Promoting team closeness with VR

Innovation

• Virtual Reality enhances team closeness
• VR improves newcomer inclusion
• Experiment compares VR and in-person interactions