Eye contact during virtual storytelling: Enhancing social evaluation through pupil mimicry

The human eye plays a crucial role in shaping social judgments; for instance, maintaining eye contact enhances social interactions and influences how others perceive us. At a more subtle level, the pupils also play an important role; recent research shows that pupil mimicry fosters trust. In our digitizing world, people frequently interact with virtual agents. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to investigate whether the positive effects of eye gaze and pupil mimicry generalize to virtual interactions. In the current study, we investigated whether eye contact and pupil dilation mimicry influence the evaluation of virtual humans and whether these effects vary with the participants’ levels of social anxiety. Six virtual humans told a story which participants watched on a monitor screen. Three of them were programmed to mimic the participants’ pupil size at moments when participants displayed natural pupil dilation, while the other three did not mimic these instances and instead, their pupil sizes dilated at random moments. After each story, we assessed how the virtual human was perceived by taking multiple social evaluation measures. The results show that the more the participants made eye contact, the more positively they evaluated the virtual human, especially during trials where the virtual humans mimicked the spontaneous instances of pupil dilation in participants’ eyes. Social anxiety levels did not influence the results. This study demonstrates that the cumulative positive effects of eye contact and pupil dilation mimicry generalize to interactions with virtual agents, which may inspire potential applications.