Who is to blame? The appearance of virtual agents and the attribution of perceived responsibility

Abstract

Virtual agents have been widely used in human-agent collaboration work. One important problem with human-agent collaboration is the attribution of responsibility as perceived by users. We focused on the relationship between the appearance of a virtual agent and the attribution of perceived responsibility. We conducted an experiment with five agents: an agent without an appearance, a human-like agent, a robot-like agent, a dog-like agent, and an angel-like agent. We measured the perceived agency and experience for each agent, and we conducted an experiment involving a soundguessing game. In the game, participants listened to a sound and guessed what the sound was with an agent. At the end of the game, the game finished with failure, and the participants did not know who made the mistake, the participant or the agent. After the game, we asked the participants how they perceived the agents’ trustworthiness and to whom they attributed responsibility. As a result, participants attributed less responsibility to themselves when interacting with a robot-like agent than interacting with an angel-like robot. Furthermore, participants perceived the least trustworthiness toward the robot-like agent among all conditions. In addition, the agents’ perceived experience had a correlation with the attribution of perceived responsibility. Furthermore, the agents that made the participants feel their attribution of responsibility to be less were not trusted. These results suggest the relationship between agents’ appearance and perceived attribution of responsibility and new methods for designs in the creation of virtual agents for collaboration work.