Warmth, competence, believability and virtual agents

Believability is a key issue for virtual agents. Most of the authors agree that emotional behavior and personality have a high impact on agents' believability. The social capacities of the agents also have an effect on users' judgment of believability. In this paper we analyze the role of plausible and/or socially appropriate emotional displays on believability. We also investigate how people judge the believability of the agent, and whether it provokes social reactions of humans toward the agent. The results of our study in the domain of software assistants, show that (a) socially appropriate emotions lead to higher perceived believability, (b) the notion of believability is highly correlated with the two major socio-cognitive variables, namely competence and warmth, and (c) considering an agent believable can be different from considering it human-like. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.