Abstract
Moral emotions have been argued to play a central role in the emergence of cooperation in human-human interactions. This work describes an experiment which tests whether this insight carries to virtual human-human interactions. In particular, the paper describes a repeated-measures experiment where subjects play the iterated prisoner’s dilemma with two versions of the virtual human: (a) neutral, which is the control condition; (b) moral, which is identical to the control condition except that the virtual human expresses gratitude, distress, remorse, reproach and anger through the face according to the action history of the game. Our results indicate that subjects cooperate more with the virtual human in the moral condition and that they perceive it to be more human-like. We discuss the relevance these results have for building agents which are successful in cooperating with humans.
This work was sponsored by the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command. The content does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.
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de Melo, C.M., Zheng, L., Gratch, J. (2009). Expression of Moral Emotions in Cooperating Agents. In: Ruttkay, Z., Kipp, M., Nijholt, A., Vilhjálmsson, H.H. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5773. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04380-2_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04380-2_32
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