First Impressions in User-Agent Encounters: the Impact of an Agent's Nonverbal Behavior on Users' Relational Decisions

We present an empirical study that investigates whether the first impressions that users form of a virtual agent have an impact on attitudes and subsequent relational behavior. Subjects experienced brief approaches to several embodied agent guides in an immersive 3D virtual museum environment. Each guide exhibited two levels (low vs. high) of extraversion and friendliness towards the subjects by using nonverbal immediacy cues of smile, gaze and proxemics. We found that the nonverbal behavior exhibited by our guides in these 12.5 second encounters, had significant effects on subjects' relational decisions in terms of how likely and how often they would like to spend time with the guides on virtual tours. In particular, guide friendliness, expressed by smiling and gazing more at the subjects, had a positive main effect for all our measures.