The Attractiveness Stereotype in the Evaluation of Embodied Conversational Agents

Physical attractiveness is an important cue for social interaction. Psychology studies have long shown that physical attractiveness can elicit positive personality attributions as well as positive behaviour towards other people. This effect is explained by the attractiveness stereotype. In this paper, we investigate whether this stereotype apply to the interaction with virtual agents. We report the results of two experiments where the attractiveness stereotype was tested with and without interaction with the agent. Results indicate a strong effect of the attractiveness stereotype, showing that users tend to form and maintain a better evaluation of attractive agents than of unattractive ones independent of actual interaction with the agent or the agents’ ethnicity. Implications for design are discussed.