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Human Obedience and Social Norm Adherence in Small Groups with Virtual Agents
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Computer Science, Computational Science and Technology (CST).ORCID iD: 0009-0005-6425-2076
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Computer Science, Computational Science and Technology (CST).ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7257-0761
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 518172, Shenzhen, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China.
2025 (English)In: Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality - 17th International Conference, VAMR 2025, Held as Part of the 27th HCI International Conference, HCII 2025, Proceedings, Springer Nature , 2025, p. 155-174Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Embodied social agents are entities, either physical or digital, that can communicate with humans or even other agents, often expressing ideas, thoughts, or emotions. In this study, participants were given the task of collecting a coffee cup standing on a table behind a free-standing conversational group of two embodied virtual agents in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Participants were presented with a social dilemma, since they had to choose whether to walk between the agents, violating their o-space, or through a narrower gap between the agents and the table. In each of the six conditions the agents expressed different interpersonal attitudes defined along Friendly/Hostile and Submissive/Dominant axes, shown through different verbal scripts and non-verbal behaviours. The 32 participants in this within-group user study walked around the agent group in 62.9% of the trials. In the four conditions where the participants were asked by one of the agents to wait, they were significantly more likely to walk around the agents rather than between them. Of those conditions, participants violated the agents’ o-space the most in the conditions in which agents’ attitudes were perceived to be the most Hostile and Dominant. Participants liked the Friendly agents the most and the Hostile agents the least. We discuss these findings in addition to their implications for the design of socially interactive agents.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Nature , 2025. p. 155-174
Keywords [en]
dominance, free-standing conversational groups, friendliness, interpersonal attitude, obedience, social agents, social norms, user study, virtual reality
National Category
Human Computer Interaction
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-368521DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-93712-5_10ISI: 001544399900008Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105008008619OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-368521DiVA, id: diva2:1989792
Conference
17th International Conference on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, VAMR 2025, held as part of the 27th HCI International Conference, HCII 2025, Gothenburg, Sweden, Jun 22 2025 - Jun 27 2025
Note

Part of ISBN 9783031937118

QC 20250818

Available from: 2025-08-18 Created: 2025-08-18 Last updated: 2025-12-08Bibliographically approved

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Pascoe, EmilePeters, Christopher

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