Same-sex attention and cooperation biases following digital social exclusion: Female users' responses to gender-coded virtual agents.

As digital interactions proliferate, social exclusion in online collaboration has become a notable social experience. This study investigates whether different digital collaborative contexts are associated with female users' early processing of gaze cues and resource allocation toward gender-coded virtual agents. Utilizing a 3 (Exclusion Context: male-group exclusion, female-group exclusion, mixed-gender inclusion) × 2 (Agent Gender: female-coded, male-coded) × 2 (SOA: 200 ms, 800 ms) mixed design, this research included 200 female participants and integrated an online collaborative task, a gaze-cueing task, and a one-shot Trust Game. Results indicated that, compared to the mixed-gender inclusion context, participants in the male-group exclusion context exhibited a greater gaze-cueing effect toward female-coded agents at the 200 ms SOA and allocated more tokens to them. In the female-group exclusion context, an equivalent prioritized allocation to female-coded agents did not emerge, and participants retained more tokens. An exploratory analysis focusing on the male-group exclusion and inclusion contexts further revealed a statistical indirect association between the early gaze-cueing effect and subsequent investment; however, this result cannot establish a causal mediating mechanism. Overall, this study provides preliminary evidence that digital exclusion contexts are associated with attentional and cooperative biases toward same-sex-coded agents. Given that the three contexts simultaneously altered exclusion status, team gender, and team composition, and that the sample comprised solely female participants from a single region, the conclusions should be restricted to contextual behavioral differences and cannot be viewed as direct evidence of a "female alliance" or gender-specific mechanisms.