Effects of anime characters’ facial expressions on donation behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

With the increasing demand for donations via the Internet, virtual agents (VAs) will be increasingly used to motivate people to donate in the future. Previous research suggests that VAs' with facial expressions indicating an emotional response to donations over and above a given minimum threshold may be effective in soliciting donations from people. In this study, we investigated whether VAs could induce human participants to donate a given amount of money encoded as a limit expressed by emotional responses using the dictator game. In contrast to prior works, the results showed that emotional responses had no effect on the amounts donated. We conducted an additional experiment to consider anchoring effects (Experiment 2), donation recipients (Experiments 3, 4, and 5), and social norms (Experiments 4 and 5). The results showed that facial expressions had no effect in any of the experiments. However, in Experiment 4, the amount of donations decreased more for recipients suffering from COVID-19 than children orphand in traffic accidents. In addition, we conducted a meta-analysis to combine the experimental results. These results showed that VAs that displayed facial expressions received an increased amount of donations, although the magnitude of this effect was limited; second, offers to people suffering from COVID-19 tended to decrease more than offers to children orphand in traffic accidents. This suggest that an agent's motivation for requesting donations via emotional expressions may impact the amounts received; these results may have been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic.