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

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. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.