The Effect of Image Features on Judgments of Homophily, Credibility, and Intention to Use as Avatars in Future Interactions

The Influence of Peer Reviews on Source Credibility and Purchase Intention

“…The perceived credibility of images has been shown to influence perceptions of presidential candidates, television commercials, and even people met face to face, avatars and online images have a similar influence on perceived credibility of the associated sources [11,16,19,39]. Thus, the perceived credibility of the image is predicted to influence the perceived credibility of the source itself as well as the way people respond to product reviews.…”

“…Essentially, information processing theory predicts that when users attend to a review they will incorporate all parts of it, as well as any available information about the source, in their assessment of the product including the text-based information as well as the initial icon or image [6,12,16]. People make evaluations and attributions of the source as they determine how much weight to give the review in their purchasing decisions.…”

“…The perception of anthropomorphism is among the first and most critical judgments made in the evaluation and perception of a social entity. Information processing theory argues that it is this perception of humanness or social potential that engages the charisma sequence and leads to the creation of personae and to categorizations associated with humans [12,16]. These attributions reflect fundamental distinctions in perceived social potential and behavior.…”

“…Visual anthropomorphism is defined here as the extent to which an image is perceived to have human morphology or visual characteristics associated with humans, or the extent to which one is seen as human, or even humanlike [16,18,[40][41][42]. The perception of anthropomorphism is among the first and most critical judgments made in the evaluation and perception of a social entity.…”

“…There is a lot of variance in the types of computer generated images online. The appearance and morphology of these images can vary according to user preferences, design decisions, system affordances, and computer processing ability, with all of these possible variations influencing perceptions of the source and associated information in different ways [13,16,18,29,[33][34][35][36][37]. Previous research looking at Buddy Icons selected for Instant Messaging interactions showed shown that only about 32% of people select human images to self-present, the rest of the images selected were either object (20%), scenes (12%), or animals (8%) [38].…”