Using Functional Neuroimaging Tools to Inform the Design of Anthropomorphic Online Product Recommendation Agents

Product recommendation agents (PRAs) are deployed extensively in e-commerce to give consumers advice on products. Although the design of PRAs has received much attention in the IS literature, the focus has been on the PRA’s functional and utilitarian characteristics, thus potentially ignoring social demographics, such as ethnicity and gender, in their design. In this study, we conducted a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study to assess how the design of anthropomorphic PRAs (humanoid avatars) can incorporate ethnicity and gender to enhance the interpersonal interaction between users and PRAs. Brain activity was captured in an fMRI scanner while users indicated their responses to three key variables – perceived usefulness, social presence, and trust – that were shown in the literature to predict the use of PRAs. Our objective was to offer a neurological explanation to prior behavioral findings that showed that ethnicity (but not gender) similarity is associated with higher perceived usefulness, social presence, and trust in PRAs, particularly in women. Specifically, users who varied on their ethnicity and gender to either match or mismatch the ethnicity and gender of four anthropomorphic PRAs were asked to interact and evaluate these PRAs on their perceived usefulness, social presence, and trust. The fMRI results help explain earlier behavioral findings by showing that the observed brain activations for the three key variables were evident mainly in women as opposed to men, while certain brain activations were primarily due to ethnicity match and others mainly due to gender match. Besides complementing and extending earlier behavioral findings and shedding light on the neurological nature of perceived usefulness, social presence, and trust, the study uncovers the nature and role of ethnicity and gender match and mismatch, as well as it informs practitioners on how to design PRAs that are more likely to be adopted and used.