Effects of Social Ingroup Cues on Empathy Towards an Intelligent Virtual Agent With a Mixed-Cultural Background

This paper presents an interaction study with a mixed-cultural Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) that investigates the impact of perceived ingroup similarity on the empathy of human interlocutors, and the perceived competence and warmth of the IVA. We herefore implemented an interactive scenario with either an IVA that should be perceived as an ingroup member or a neutral IVA. Our results show that the IVA in the ingroup condition triggered significantly more empathy and was rated significantly more competent than the IVA in the neutral condition. Regarding perceived warmth, both IVAs were rated rather high, revealing no significant differences. With these results we contribute to the goal of raising empathy towards IVAs with mixed-cultural backgrounds, to be potentially used in scenarios that aim at studying and reducing implicit racial bias.