Examining direct and indirect social influence with virtual characters

With the emergence of interface agents and virtual characters in everyday applications, understanding how people respond to this new medium is crucial. The research presented in this dissertation examines peoples' responses to virtual characters by applying principles from the field of social psychology to study human-virtual human interactions. This dissertation presents empirical results from a series of experiments investigating how people react to and are influenced by virtual characters.; The first two experiments examine indirect social influence by drawing on the social facilitation/inhibition paradigm from the field of social psychology. Social facilitation/inhibition theory states that when in the presence of others, people perform simple or learned tasks better and complex or novel tasks worse. The results from these experiments showed participants were inhibited by the presence of others, whether real or virtual.; The final experiment examined direct social influence by drawing on the persuasion paradigm from the field of social psychology. The results indicated that the virtual speakers were as effective at changing attitudes as real people.; The overall conclusion is that people do respond similarly to virtual characters as they respond to real people. And surprisingly, gender plays a more significant role than realism in how people respond to virtual characters.