The avatar face-off: a face(less) avatar facilitates adults’ reports of personal events

Despite the potential benefits of telehealth, disclosure of personal information via this technology is often low due to embarrassment. One potential way to promote disclosure might be the use of avatars as conversational partners. Here, we explored this possibility by investigating the effects of avatars’ human facial features and informed agency on adults’ reports of embarrassing personal events and their views of the avatars. Adults (N = 111) were interviewed about a personal event by either a faceless, speech-wave avatar or a human-appearing avatar. Participants were also told that the avatar was either human-operated or computer-operated. Participants who were interviewed by a faceless avatar reported more information of higher quality about a personal event than did participants who were interviewed by a human-appearing avatar. This finding was consistent with participants’ preference for a faceless avatar for discussing embarrassing topics. Participants’ knowledge of the avatar’s agency did not impact the quantity or quality of their reports or choice of avatar. The present experiment highlights the importance of avatars’ appearance when considering their utility in eliciting detailed disclosure of potentially embarrassing information.