Doctoral Consortium: Human aspects of virtual characters

Abstract

On the one hand, virtual characters may be similar to people in terms of appearance and behavior, but on the other hand, they cannot be considered fully "human". The main goal of this project is to answer the question about the boundaries of the analogy between interactions with real people and interactions with virtual characters. To investigate this, I plan three lines of research covering performance-based as well as economic and moral decision-making tasks. The tasks will differ in terms of the explicitness of the correct answer (from an easy to define the appropriate solution in performance tasks to the inability to choose the only correct option in moral dilemmas) and complexity of the social situation. The main outcome of the experiments will be the answer to the question of how "humanly" are virtual characters treated. I expect that if virtual human are treated like real people, I will observe similar behavioral patterns as when people have real social interactions. Additionally, I plan to systematically manipulate the external characteristics of a virtual character to find the determinants of its influence on participant’s behavior. Specifically, I will attempt to achieve the level of realism appropriate to induce a sense of copresence and consequent influence of virtual characters on people’s behavior. The entire project will therefore answer a broader question about the possibility, scope and nature of the influence of virtual characters on human behavior.