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Wow, You Are Terrible at This!: An Intercultural Study on Virtual Agents Giving Mixed Feedback

Authors:

Lara-Sophie Bornholdt,

Oliver KornAuthors Info & Claims

IVA '20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

Article No.: 55, Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423887

Published: 19 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

While the effects of virtual agents in terms of likeability, uncanniness, etc. are well explored, it is unclear how their appearance and the feedback they give affects people's reactions. Is critical feedback from an agent embodied as a mouse or a robot taken less serious than from a human agent? In an intercultural study with 120 participants from Germany and the US, participants had to find hidden objects in a game and received feedback on their performance by virtual agents with different appearances. As some levels were designed to be unsolvable, critical feedback was unavoidable. We hypothesized that feedback would be taken more serious, the more human the agent looked. Also, we expected the subjects from the US to react more sensitively to criticism. Surprisingly, our results showed that the agents' appearance did not significantly change the participants' perception. Also, while we found highly significant differences in inspirational and motivational effects as well as in perceived task load between the two cultures, the reactions to criticism were contrary to expectations based on established cultural models. This work improves our understanding on how affective virtual agents are to be designed, both with respect to culture and to dialogue strategies.

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Cited By

Wang ICalvo RWang HRuiz JLugrin BLatoschik Mvon Mammen SKopp SPécune FPelachaud C(2023)Stop Copying MeProceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3570945.3607322(1-4)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570945.3607322
Caserman PBaumgartner KGöbel SKorn O(2023)A best practice for gamification in large companies: An extensive study focusing inter-generational acceptanceMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-023-16877-783:12(35175-35195)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
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Wow, You Are Terrible at This!: An Intercultural Study on Virtual Agents Giving Mixed Feedback

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cover image ACM Conferences

IVA '20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

October 2020

394 pages

ISBN:9781450375863

DOI:10.1145/3383652

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 19 October 2020

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IVA '20: ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

October 20 - 22, 2020

Scotland, Virtual Event, UK

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Cited By

Wang ICalvo RWang HRuiz JLugrin BLatoschik Mvon Mammen SKopp SPécune FPelachaud C(2023)Stop Copying MeProceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3570945.3607322(1-4)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570945.3607322
Caserman PBaumgartner KGöbel SKorn O(2023)A best practice for gamification in large companies: An extensive study focusing inter-generational acceptanceMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-023-16877-783:12(35175-35195)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-16877-7
Batista Gde Souza Monteiro Mde Castro Salgado LSantos CBento Villela MRios da Hora Rodrigues Kde Gois Ribeiro Darin T(2022)How do ChatBots look like?Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3554364.3559138(1-8)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3554364.3559138
Murata Mde Souza Monteiro Mde Castro Salgado LMonteiro Ida Hora Rodrigues Kde Gois Ribeiro Darin TFreire AMota M(2021)OmotenashiProceedings of the XX Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3472301.3484372(1-7)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3472301.3484372

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