Mimicry facilitates social bonding and increases the feelings of affiliation and liking. However, not every individual perceives mimicry in the same way. Previous research showed that there are...Show moreMimicry facilitates social bonding and increases the feelings of affiliation and liking. However, not every individual perceives mimicry in the same way. Previous research showed that there are consistent differences among various groups. Nevertheless, previous studies failed to establish whether gender can also play a role in evaluating explicit mimicry. Unlike the previous studies, the focus of this research is implicit mimicry. Since mimicry does not always occur on explicit level, investigating mimicry that occurs on implicit level, such as pupil dilation mimicry, might lead to a different result. In this study, the aim is to investigate whether gender has an influence on the evaluation of avatars which mimic or does not mimic the participants pupil dilation. For the purposes of this study, avatar is defined as an artificial intelligence figure representing a real person. To test the effect of gender on mimicry, 19 females and 10 males interacted with 6 avatars. 3 of them mimicked the participant’s pupil dilation while the other 3 avatars did not. Afterwards, participants evaluated how much they liked the avatar and how much they would like to meet the speaker in real life. Overall, female participants evaluated both mimicking and non-mimicking avatars more negatively than the male participants. However, female participants reported a higher desire for the future interaction with non-mimicking avatars in comparison to males. The study did not yield a significant result. However, the difference between genders in mimicry evaluation was still observed.Show less
