Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that autonomous artificial entities elicit social behavior on the part of the human\r\ninterlocutor. Various theoretical approaches have tried to explain this phenomenon. The agency assumption states that the social\r\ninfluence of human interaction partners (represented by avatars) will always be higher than the influence of artificial entities\r\n(represented by embodied conversational agents). Conversely, the Ethopoeia concept predicts that automatic social reactions are\r\ntriggered by situations as soon as they include social cues. Both theories have been challenged in a 2 Ã?â?? 2 between subjects design\r\nwith two levels of agency (low: agent, high: avatar) and two interfaces with different degrees of social cues (low: textchat, high: virtual\r\nhuman). The results show that participants in the virtual human condition reported a stronger sense ofmutual awareness, imputed\r\nmore positive characteristics, and allocated more attention to the virtual human than participants in the text chat conditions. Only\r\none result supports the agency assumption; participants who believed to interact with a human reported a stronger feeling of social\r\npresence than participants who believed to interact with an artificial entity. It is discussed to what extent these results support the\r\nsocial cue assumption made in the Ethopoeia approach.
Loading....