Are You Telling Me the Truth? Authenticity of Responses in Virtual Worlds Research

Basing on social response theory of consumer behavior, which predicts that the use of social cues in human-computer interaction elicits more sincere responses (Moon 2000; Moon 2003), and recognizing that the social dimension is dominant in virtual worlds’ interactions, we hypothesize that virtual worlds are externally valid contexts for marketing research. We test our hypothesis comparing answers provided in a virtual world context to answers provided in a real context on two heuristics: evaluation and choice. Evidence obtained from two studies supports the external validity of virtual world setting for marketing research both when participants are asked to perform an evaluation and when participants are asked to make a choice.