Modeling culture in intelligent virtual agents

• DOI: 10.1007/s10458-015-9312-6
• Publication Date: 2015-10-18T22:21:48Z
• Authors: Samuel Mascarenhas; Nick Degens; Ana Paiva; Rui Prada; Gert Jan Hofstede; Adrie Beulens; Ruth Aylett
• Keywords: Individualistic culture; Trait; Metaverse

This work addresses the challenge of creating virtual agents that are able to portray culturally appropriate behavior when interacting with other or humans. Because culture influences how people perceive their social reality it is important have agent models explicitly consider elements, such as existing relational factors. We addressed this necessity by integrating into a novel model for simulating human behavior. With model, we operationalized particular dimension culture—individualism versus collectivism—within context an interactive narrative scenario part agent-based tool intercultural training. Using conducted cross-cultural study in which participants from collectivistic country (Portugal) were compared individualistic (the Netherlands) way they perceived and interacted whose was either collectivistic, according configuration proposed model. In obtained results, Portuguese subjects rated more positively than Dutch but both countries had similarly positive opinion about agents. experiment sheds new light on different differ assessing appropriateness agents, while also raising research questions matter.