CHI '94 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
An avatar-based help system for web-portals
HCII'11 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Human-computer interaction: interaction techniques and environments - Volume Part II
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The initial idea behind the study described in this paper was to assess the perceived socialness of anthropomorphic agents in computer human interaction. In a nuclear power plant simulation scenario users were assisted by an anthropomorphic agent completing several tasks. Afterwards the agent was assessed using questionnaires that were presented in three different modalities. One group completed a pen and paper questionnaire, another one used a web-based version of the questionnaire, and the third group was asked the questions directly by the agent. We expected the group assessed directly by the agent to behave more politely and to overall give the best ratings. While we did not attain the expected results our study revealed first evidence that the "Computers as Social Actors" paradigm might have to be reconsidered. We argue that the prevalence of computers nowadays might have caused computers not to be treated as "standalone social entities" anymore but to be rather perceived as a "window to the Internet" rendering social behavior towards computers obsolete under certain conditions.