Browsing by Subject "feature migration"

Social psychologists have long assumed that imitation produces rapport and interpersonal trust in the perceiver, but more recent research into the imitation-trust relationship has produced mixed results. In studies utilizing human confederates and longer interaction periods, imitation has produced trust and better negotiation outcomes but when using more controlled settings and short encounters with virtual human characters, such an association has not been found. With this in mind, I sought to investigate whether a prolonged period of interaction with an imitating virtual agent would facilitate the link between imitation and trust. As some research on imitation induced self-other overlap (or ‘feature shifting’) would indicate, I also wanted to identify whether being imitated by someone trustworthy would produce trustworthy behaviour and whether imitation by someone untrustworthy would produce less trustworthy behaviour in participants. To investigate the proposed effects, participants were instructed to play an iterative trust game with 8 different virtual agents, encountering each agent in five subsequent trials. In each trial of the game, one player (investor) was asked to make an investment (i.e. an index of trust) in the other player (receiver) and that was then tripled. The receiver then decided how much of the tripled amount to return (i.e. an index of trustworthiness). In half of the investment trials, participants’ head movements were imitated by the agent, whereafter participants proceeded to make the investment. I found evidence in the first investment trial that imitation promotes trust, with higher amounts invested in the imitators than in the non-imitators. However, after repeated investment trials, the effect of imitation diminished and agents' previous pay back behavior (i.e. trustworthiness) guided investments: participants increased their investments with trustworthy agents but reduced their investments with untrustworthy agents. In receiver trials, more money was paid back after interacting with a trustworthy than with an untrustworthy agent. However, no evidence was found that imitation played a role in this and similarly no evidence for the role of feature shifting was found either. In conclusion, it appears that imitation promotes trust in an initial encounter but over time behavioral reliability plays a greater role than imitation in affecting trust.