Investigating the contributing factors to make users react toward an on-screen agent as if they are reacting toward a robotic agent

Abstract

Our former study showed that users tended not to react to an on-screen agent's invitation of a Shiritori game (a last and first game) but that they did to a robotic agent. Our purpose in this study was to investigate the contributing factors that could make users react toward an on-screen agent as if they were reacting toward a robotic agent. We focused on the following two contributing factors: whether users accepted an invitation from a robotic agent and whether an on-screen agent was an attractive personality or character for the users. The results showed that the participants who first accepted the invitation of the robotic agent that was assigned an attractive character reacted toward the on-screen agent as if they were reacting to the robotic one; that is, these two factors played a significant role in making the participants react toward the on-screen agent as if they were reacting toward the robotic agent.