Context-dependent roles of familiarity, discipline, and personality in shaping social engagement in cooperative immersive learning

Collaborative learning represents a fundamental component of higher education, yet disparities in disciplinary perspectives, communication styles, and pre-existing social ties can lead to divergent interpretations of tasks and unbalanced contribution dynamics. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) offers innovative opportunities to mitigate these challenges. This study examines the combined influence of interpersonal familiarity, academic discipline, and personality trait composition on social interaction within a cooperative two-player IVR escape room game. A mixed methods approach, which combined quantitative questionnaires with qualitative observations and interviews, involved 108 students who formed 54 pairs. The analysis reveals a complex, context-dependent relationship between familiarity and participation. The study shows that although familiarity is generally associated with greater confidence and social interdependence, unfamiliar interdisciplinary pairs demonstrate significantly greater behavioral involvement, suggesting that unfamiliarity and cognitive divergence may be linked to more active communication and exploration. Furthermore, personality similarity was significantly associated with the satisfaction of unfamiliar pairs, and unfamiliar extrovert–extrovert pairs reported the highest motivational satisfaction. These findings challenge the assumption that familiarity is universally beneficial and offer actionable strategies for composing student groups to align with specific pedagogical objectives, such as pairing unfamiliar interdisciplinary students to promote exploration or familiar homogeneous groups to maximize efficiency. These findings provide an improved framework for collaboration, highlighting the need to align team composition with task structure in the design of cooperative IVR learning environments.