When too heavy is just fine: Creating trustworthy e-health advisors

Authors:
H. C. van Vugt;E. A. Konijn;J. F. Hoorn;J. Veldhuis
Affiliations:
Department of Communication Science, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Department of Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, ...;Department of Communication Science, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Center for Advanced Media Research Amsterdam (CAMeRA), VU University Amsterd ...;Department of Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Center for Advanced Media Research Amsterdam (CAMeRA), VU University Amsterdam, ...;Department of Communication Science, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Venue:
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Year:
2009

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Abstract

In using weight and diet advisors, people compare embodied agents with their actual selves and with the person they want to be: someone with an ideal weight; their ideal selves. In a laboratory and an online experiment, we scrutinized the effects of similarity with and idealness of an embodied agent feature on user involvement with, distance towards, and intentions to use the e-health advisor. The advisor's body size was either similar or dissimilar to the user's actual body size, and had an, according to the user, ideal (slender) or non-ideal (heavier) shape. Results indicated that the factor perceived idealness was more important than similarity for explaining involvement with, distance towards, and intentions to use the embodied agent, but in an unexpected way. Users regarded the heavier, non-ideal, e-health advisors as more trustworthy, which explained the larger part of the variance in the level of involvement, distance, and intentions to use a health advisor. Sometimes, it seems better to forget the stereotypical preference and design embodied agents that are not ideal.