Smile and the world will smile with you - The effects of a virtual agent's smile on users' evaluation and behavior

摘要

Recent studies have demonstrated that people show social reactions when interacting with human-like virtual agents. For instance, human users behave in a socially desirable way, show increased cooperation or apply human-like communication. It has, however, so far not been tested whether users are prone to mimic the artificial agent's behavior although this is a widely cited phenomenon of human-human communication that seems to be especially indicative of the sociality of the situation. We therefore conducted an experiment, in which we analyzed whether humans reciprocate an agent's smile. In a between-subjects design, 104 participants conducted an 8-min small-talk conversation with an agent that either did not smile, showed occasional smiles, or displayed frequent smiles. Results show that although smiling did not have a distinct impact on the evaluation of the agent, the human interaction partners themselves smiled longer when the agent was smiling.