The role of sexual orientation and sexual prejudice against gay men in the regulation of virtual comfortdistance towards artificial agents

The proxemics literature has long investigated the space maintained during social interactions and found that the separation zone that individuals keep between themselves and others (known as interpersonal distance, IPD) is automatically regulated according to distance-related feelings of personal comfort. Similar results have been found when participants interact with virtual confederates, suggesting that Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) may represent a promising tool for investigating the IPD in an ecological and accurate way. Tellingly, the sex of the interactants seems to play a prominent role in the regulation of IPD. For instance, evidence shows that women dyads maintain closer distances than men dyads; however, this result has not been replicated in other studies. One of the possible reasons for the inconsistencies across studies could be the lack of consideration of other important aspects regarding sexuality. To explore this issue, 72 Italian participants, sorted into groups according to their sexual orientation (heterosexual/non-heterosexual) and their sex (men/women), performed a stopdistance task towards approaching male or female virtual avatars seen through an head-mounted display. Participants adjusted IPD using a joystick and had to indicate when they felt the IPD as comfortable. Through a continuous participant-avatar tracking, the distance (cm) at which participants stopped the virtual avatar was calculated. Participants’ levels of implicit and explicit sexual prejudice against gay men were also collected. Bayesian analyses showed that same-sex IPD was smaller for non-heterosexual compared to heterosexual participants. Moreover, only in the group of heterosexual men, the implicit prejudice against gay men was associated with a larger distance towards the male avatar and a closer distance towards the female avatar. These results suggest that among heterosexual men, higher levels of implicit prejudice are associated with enhanced perceived threat during spatial interactions with other men and are also associated with enhanced need of reducing distance with women, probably in the attempt to maintain cultural ideals of masculinity and appropriate gender roles for men. Furthermore, our findings support the idea that considering only biological sex gives a limited account of IPD regulation since there are within-sex differences dependent on sexual orientation. Overall, our approach suggests that IVR may allow to overcome limitations typical of studies with real participants and provide a unique opportunity to explore the physiological and neural underpinnings of sexuality-related variables that regulate IPD.