Virtual assistants are widely regarded as silly things. Remember Clippy, from Microsoft Word? People basically danced on his grave.
But virtual assistants are actually important. As online learning becomes more prevalent, “helpers” in the form of avatars play a key role in instruction. A new study, forthcoming in Computers in Human Behavior, starts there and goes beyond the mere relevance of digital buddies to reveal a few things about personality, gender, and race in the virtual realm. As it turns out, people prefer avatars that are similar to them.
Tara Behrend, an assistant professor of organizational sciences at George Washington University, and Lori Foster Thompson, an associate professor of psychology at North Carolina State University, studied a sample of 257 people who interacted with some kind of helping avatars. On the whole, people reported higher engagement with avatars that looked like them, in terms of race and gender. They also learned better from the avatars when the helpers appeared to hold similar opinions about success. Learners who preferred striving for a a personal best (measured against prior performance), rather than an absolute best (measured against others’ performance), learned more when their avatars measured success the same way.