Abstract
Synthetic news anchors are increasingly deployed, yet little is known about how their designed visual attributes shape audience response. Because every attribute of an AI anchor is designed, a single visual cue can be isolated. This study asked whether attire matching the broadcast context raises perceived congruence, and whether congruence carries downstream effects on continued viewing. In a mixed-design experiment, 397 U.S. adults were assigned to one of eight conditions crossing anchor gender with the attire worn in each context, and viewed both an awards ceremony and a Christmas festival report rendered with photorealistic MetaHuman stimuli; each context was analyzed as a 2 × 2 design. Attire had no statistically significant total effect on viewers’ willingness to keep watching. What attire did change was appraisal. Contrary to a context-matching account, business attire produced higher perceived congruence than thematic attire in both contexts—the suit-schema paradox, so named because the attire designed to fit the occasion was judged to fit the broadcast less well. Neither context isolates fit to the occasion: one thematic garment was a costume, the other less reliably recognized. In an exploratory test the effect was present for the male anchor and not detected for the female anchor; that this reflects anchor gender is a hypothesis the stimuli cannot adjudicate, as each gender had a single face, voice, and business garment. Among the measured variables, congruence predicted AI trust, which predicted continued viewing intention; a parallel route through immersion is reported as exploratory on reliability grounds.