Do we differ in our dispositional tendency to perceive virtual agents as animate beings?: The influence of user factors in the evaluation of virtual agents

Abstract

With few exceptions, the role of user factors in the evaluation of virtual agents has largely been neglected. By taking them into account properly, researchers and virtual agent developers might be able to better understand interindividual differences in virtual agent evaluations. We propose the animacy attribution tendency as a novel user factor that assesses a users individual threshold to accept virtual entities as living and animate beings. Users scoring higher in animacy attribution tendency should accept anomalies in virtual agent behavior more easily and thus provide favorable evaluations. To investigate the impact of this novel concept along with other user factors, we first developed a test to assess interindividual differences of animacy attribution and subsequently carried out an online-study, during which participants had to evaluate video recordings of different virtual agents.