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With immersive technologies, individuals can use different forms of digital representations (or avatars) for work or entertainment in immersive virtual reality (IVR). We hypothesized that embodying an avatar with a dissimilar appearance, compared to a similar one, would induce psychological distance and thus enhance creative thinking and insight problem solving. To test this hypothesis, participants wore an IVR headset and completed creativity and problem-solving tasks while embodying avatars of varying similarity to themselves. The results showed that participants who embodied a dissimilar avatar solved more insight problems than those with a similar avatar. Theoretically, our findings provide further evidence for construal level theory. 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