Whale You Go Green? Immediate and Longitudinal Effects of Embodied Conversational AI Avatars on Sustainable Behavioral Tendencies and Pro-Environmental Attitudes

In plain English

A randomized experiment with 576 participants compared four embodied avatars — a beluga whale, Greta Thunberg, Emma Watson and a generic human — against a text chatbot and a no-intervention control. Every embodied avatar increased immediate sustainable product selection over both the chatbot and the control, with no significant differences between the avatar designs, so embodiment itself appears to be doing the work rather than who the avatar looks like. Only the beluga raised pro-environmental attitudes immediately, and two months later, among 287 returning participants, only the beluga still showed higher sustainable choice — a hint that a non-human character is more memorable than a realistic one, on a single longitudinal condition.