Testing the relationship between mimicry, trust and rapport in virtual reality conversations

Abstract

People mimic each other’s actions and postures during everyday interactions. It is widely believed this mimicry acts as a social glue, leading to increased rapport. We present two studies using virtual reality to rigorously test this hypothesis. In Study 1, 50 participants interacted with two avatars who either mimicked their head and torso movements at a 1 or 3 second time delay or did not mimic, and rated feelings of rapport and trust toward the avatars. Rapport was higher towards mimicking avatars, with no effect of timing. In Study 2, we aimed to replicate this effect in a pre-registered design and test whether it is modulated by cultural ingroup-outgroup boundaries. Forty participants from European or East Asian backgrounds interacted with four avatars, two of European appearance and two of East Asian appearance. Two avatars mimicked while the other two did not. We found no effects of mimicry on rapport or trust ratings or implicit trust behaviour in a novel maze task, and no effects of group status or interactions. These null results were calculated in line with our pre-registration. We conclude that being mimicked does not always increase rapport or trust, and make suggestions for future directions.

Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape

“…For instance, knowing the participant's head location means that a virtual character can be programmed to orient their head and/or gaze towards participant's head (Forbes, Pan, & Hamilton, 2016; Pan & Hamilton, 2015) and to maintain an appropriate social distance by stepping back or forward (Pan, Gillies, Barker, Clark, & Slater, 2012). The ability to link the behaviour of a virtual character to the participant in real time also facilitated a series of studies on mimicry in VR, where the virtual character copies participants’ head movements (Bailenson & Yee, 2007; Verberne, Ham, Ponnada, & Midden, 2013), or both head and torso movements (Hale & Hamilton, 2016). …”

“…how accurately etc.? By building a VR system which implements mimicry, we can begin to address these questions and test the theory in detail (Hale & Hamilton, 2016). Similarly, theories might suggest that joint attention is implemented in particular brain systems, but testing this required a VR implementation of joint attention (Schilbach et al ., 2010), which requires us to specify the duration of mutual gaze between the participant and VC, the timing of the looks to the object, and the contingencies between these behaviours.…”

“…With virtual characters, it is possible to create infinitely many combinations of social variables and test them against each other. This has proved valuable in the study of social perception (Todorov, Said, Engell, & Oosterhof, 2008) and social interaction (Hale & Hamilton, 2016; Sacheli et al ., 2015). …”

Human, Chameleon or Nodding Dog?

“…A similar study suggested that mimicry makes avatars more likely to be trusted [49]. However, these results have not been consistently replicated [28,46]. This paper sets out to investigate this apparent inconsistency in the results.…”

Sensory Metrics of Neuromechanical Trust

“…Our more refined metrics could be used not simply to match communications media to communicative task, but also to design VR with greater presence. Meetings held in a VR environment could benefit from the medium's ability to transmit nonverbal channels of communication, especially if those channels were modeled with spatiotemporal fidelity rather than as categories like "head and torso movements" (Hale & Hamilton, 2016). It might be tempting to capture and algorithmically distill those cues as a visible bar or heat map, but such a process would suffer serious information losses during both encoding and decoding.…”