How social is social responses to computers? The function of the degree of anthropomorphism in computer representations

Testing the assumption that more anthropomorphic (human-like) computer representations elicit more social responses from people, a between-participants experiment (N = 168) manipulated 12 computer agents to represent four levels of anthropomorphism: low, medium, high, and real human images. Social responses were assessed with users’ social judgment and homophily perception of the agents, conformity in a choice dilemma task, and competency and trustworthiness ratings of the agents. Linear polynomial trend analyses revealed significant linear trends for almost all the measures. As the agent became more anthropomorphic to being human, it received more social responses from users.