Human Obedience and Social Norm Adherence in Small Groups with Virtual Agents

Emile Pascoe, Christopher Peters, Sahba Zojaji

Abstract: 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.