Brynn at Shakesville points to a study by Kristine Nowak and Christian Rauh of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Connecticut. The authors investigated the impact of the appearance of digital avatars on people’s perceptions of trustworthiness. (Here’s what appears to be an earlier version of the study.) They did a blind test, with participants chatting online via various sorts of avatars. Some looked recognizably human and gender-specific, others were cats or lizards or apples. They then asked the participants to rate the credibility of the people they had been talking to.

Everyone is talking about the fact that the participants rated androgynous avatars as less trustworthy. Images that were recognizably male or female were thought of as more credible than those sneaky in-between ones.

To me, the more important finding was that the ketchup bottle finished near the very bottom of the trustworthiness scale, only beating out a menacing-looking lizard beast. Even the cat was judged more trustworthy than the ketchup bottle; if you’ve ever met a cat, you’ll understand that that’s saying something. I’m happy to see that my long-standing distrust of ketchup has been scientifically vindicated.

(Others have suggested that the study’s authors are just dumb bitches. Happily, sexism has been eradicated, so that web page must be at least fifty years old.)