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The Effect of Visual Gender on Abuse in Conversation with ECAs

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Author

Editor

  • Yukiko Nakano
  • Michael Neff
  • Ana Paiva
  • Marilyn A. Walker

Summary, in English

Previous studies have shown that female ECAs are more likely to be abused than male agents, which may cement gender stereotypes. In the study reported in this paper a visually androgynous ECA in the form of a teachable agent in an educational math game was compared with a female and male agent. The re-sults confirm that female agents are more prone to be verbally abused than male agents, but also show that the visually androgynous agent was less abused than the female although more than the male agent. A surprising finding was that very few students asked the visually androgynous agent whether it was a boy or a girl. These results suggest that androgyny may be a way to keep both genders represented, which is especially important in pedagogical settings, simultaneously lowering the abusive behavior and perhaps most important, loosen the connection between gender and abuse.

Department/s

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Pages

153-160

Publication/Series

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Volume

7502

Issue

IVA 2012

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Learning

Keywords

  • embodied conversational agent
  • conversational pedagogical agent
  • teachable agent
  • off-task interaction
  • social conversation
  • visual aspects
  • visual gender
  • abuse

Conference name

Intelligent Virtual Agents

Conference date

2012-09-12 - 2012-09-14

Conference place

Santa Cruz, CA, United States

Status

Published

Research group

  • Lund University Cognitive Science (LUCS)

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 978-3-642-33196-1