Impact of Immersiveness on Persuasiveness, Politeness, and Social Adherence in Human-Agent Interactions within Small Groups
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Date
2023
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Politeness is critical for shaping human-human interactions and therefore seems an important consideration in human interactions with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). However, the impact of artificially-generated politeness behaviors on humans in Virtual Environments (VE) is not clear. We explore the impact of immersiveness on the perceived politeness and consequent persuasive abilities of ECAs in a small group context. A user study with two main conditions, immersive and nonimmersive, was conducted with 66 participants. In the immersive condition, participants were fully immersed in virtual reality (HMD, walking freely), while in the non-immersive condition, participants used a desktop computer interface (screen display, mouse and keyboard control). In both conditions, the primary agent in a group of two ECAs invited participants to join the group using six politeness behaviors derived from Brown and Levinson's politeness theory. While the results of the study did not indicate any significant differences between the immersive and non-immersive conditions in terms of persuasiveness and offensiveness, in the immersive condition, participants perceived the ECAs as less friendly and found their requests to be less clear. On the other hand, participants in the immersive condition reported a greater sense of freedom. Furthermore, the nonimmersive condition showed higher adherence to social norms compared to the immersive condition. These findings emphasize the significance of examining immersiveness on the persuasiveness of ECAs and their perceived politeness and social adherence by humans in human-agent interactions within small groups.
Description
CCS Concepts: Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; Virtual reality; User studies
@inproceedings{10.2312:egve.20231315,
booktitle = {ICAT-EGVE 2023 - International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments},
editor = {Jean-Marie Normand and Maki Sugimoto and Veronica Sundstedt},
title = {{Impact of Immersiveness on Persuasiveness, Politeness, and Social Adherence in Human-Agent Interactions within Small Groups}},
author = {Zojaji, Sahba and Steed, Anthony and Peters, Christopher},
year = {2023},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-530X},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-218-9},
DOI = {10.2312/egve.20231315}
}