Creating a World for Socio-Cultural Agents

Degens, Nick; Hofstede, Gert Jan; Breen, John Mc; Beulens, A.J.M.; Mascarenhas, Samuel; Ferreira, Nuno; Paiva, Ana; Dignum, Frank

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-12973-0_2

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(18 reference statements)

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“…For instance, customers in collectivist cultures may try to build a friendship with a virtual agent, whereas customers in individualist cultures may treat an agent as an assistant for completing a task. Researchers show that in collectivist cultures it is important for virtual agents to infer the social status of a user (e.g., in-group vs. out-group, high social status vs. low social status) and adjust the interaction accordingly, as perceived social distance (e.g., stranger vs. friend) can influence the user’s trust in the agent (Degens et al 2014). Accordingly, the virtual agent’s tone should be adjusted across cultures.…”

Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Environment in Global Markets: Cross-Cultural Implications for Evolving Customer Journeys

Nam¹,

Kannan²

2020

Journal of International Marketing

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Digital technologies and digital media are changing the environments in which firms interact with customers. However, the evolution of digital organizational forms, customer technology use, and the nature of customer journeys differ significantly across global markets. Drawing on observations of customer journeys across different international markets, the authors propose a framework to explain the observed differences in terms of the cross-cultural and socioeconomic factors that influence customer journeys. The authors put forth several propositions built on logical extensions of the extant research findings and identify areas for future academic research. In addition, they outline the managerial implications arising from the application of the framework for multinational firms seeking to market their products and services across global markets.

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Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Environment in Global Markets: Cross-Cultural Implications for Evolving Customer Journeys

Nam¹,

Kannan²

2020

Journal of International Marketing

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“…We did so to evaluate whether our training tool can help trainees progress through our learning outcomes, which is more likely to happen if trainees encounter multiple interactions. For future work, it is important to validate invididual incidents in terms of perception and presence of misunderstandings (see our previous work on the evaluation of incidents [39]). …”

Section: General Discussion and Conclu-sionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first is through the behaviour of the virtual characters, with which users will interact during their travels, and the primary reason for a misunderstanding or conflict in each incident. Due to the scope of this article, we have chosen not to focus on the design of these virtual characters, and instead refer to our other work for more information [39], [40].…”

Section: Modelling the Incidentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don't Be a Stranger-Designing a Digital Intercultural Sensitivity Training Tool that is Culture General

Degens

Hofstede

Beulens

et al. 2016

IEEE Trans. Learning Technol.

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Digital intercultural training tools play an important role in helping people to mediate cultural misunderstandings. In recent years, these tools were made to teach about specific cultures, but there has been little attention for the design of a tool to teach about differences across a wide range of cultures. In this work, we take the first steps to create a digital self-contained culture-general training tool. In the first part of the article, we focus on different aspects and methods of intercultural training. This information is then used in the second part to evaluate the effect of these different methods on the perception of behaviour in misunderstandings. We found that experiential and story-based approaches may lead to different perceptions of participants. In the third part, we expanded on these critical incidents, and incorporated virtual characters, to evaluate if experiential incidents in an embedded story can lead to an attribution of perceived differences in behaviour to specific differences in culture, and to users becoming less judgemental of inappropriate behaviours by people from different cultures. The results suggest that the tool had some effect, but that a debriefing relating the general differences to specific instances would be beneficial.

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“…Researchers have also focused on creating agents that model and portray different cultures [2,29,36,37], follow specific social rules [12,25], or adapt to the culture of the user [35,38]. For example, Mascarenhas et al [29] created groups of agents with differing behaviors based on their own cultural standards.…”

Section: Cultural Factors In Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wow, You Are Terrible at This!

Wang

Buchweitz

Smith

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

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While the effects of virtual agents in terms of likeability, uncanniness, etc. are well explored, it is unclear how their appearance and the feedback they give affects people's reactions. Is critical feedback from an agent embodied as a mouse or a robot taken less serious than from a human agent? In an intercultural study with 120 participants from Germany and the US, participants had to find hidden objects in a game and received feedback on their performance by virtual agents with different appearances. As some levels were designed to be unsolvable, critical feedback was unavoidable. We hypothesized that feedback would be taken more serious, the more human the agent looked. Also, we expected the subjects from the US to react more sensitively to criticism. Surprisingly, our results showed that the agents' appearance did not significantly change the participants' perception. Also, while we found highly significant differences in inspirational and motivational effects as well as in perceived task load between the two cultures, the reactions to criticism were contrary to expectations based on established cultural models. This work improves our understanding on how affective virtual agents are to be designed, both with respect to culture and to dialogue strategies. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Intelligent agents; • Social and professional topics → Cultural characteristics; • Humancentered computing → User studies.

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Creating a World for Socio-Cultural Agents

Cited by 7 publications

References 17 publications

Digital Environment in Global Markets: Cross-Cultural Implications for Evolving Customer Journeys

Digital Environment in Global Markets: Cross-Cultural Implications for Evolving Customer Journeys

Don't Be a Stranger-Designing a Digital Intercultural Sensitivity Training Tool that is Culture General

Wow, You Are Terrible at This!

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