Understanding Viewers’ Attitudes Toward Virtual Streamers: A Systematic Review

Live streaming is a significant market for millions of users. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the emergence of virtual humans, which play an important role in live streaming. However, there is a lack of systematic reviews of viewers’ attitudes towards virtual streamers. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic review according to the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines, obtaining 40 papers on viewers’ attitudes towards virtual streamers from the Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, IEEE, and EBSCO Business Source Complete. Our results indicate that research on virtual streamers has shown an increasing trend. This topic has multidisciplinary theoretical foundations and is suitable for multiple qualitative and quantitative methods. Various attitudes towards virtual streamers were studied as dependent variables in the included studies. The most frequently investigated attitude is the purchasing intention of products endorsed by virtual streamers because e-commerce is the most common scenario in which virtual streamers are used. The use, type, and characteristics of virtual streamers can influence these attitudes. Based on the stereotype content model (SCM), the stimulus-organism-response (SOR), the affect-behavior-cognition (ABC) attitude model, and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this study established a comprehensive framework to integrate the main findings of existing research on virtual streamers and reveals the mechanisms through which the use, types, and characteristics of virtual streamers influence viewers’ attitudes. These findings contribute to the knowledge about virtual streamers and practical implications for practitioners in fields such as e-commerce and marketing.