Anthropomorphism of computers: Is it mindful or mindless?

By Youjeong Kim, Shyam Sundar. 2012

434 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Safety Research, Human-Computer Interaction

How researchers see this paper

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In Human-Computer Interaction

Citations in the corpus

Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models (2021, background): “Note that these effects do not require the user to actually believe that the chatbot is human: rather, a ‘mindless’ anthropomorphism effect takes place, whereby users respond to more human-like chatbots with more social responses even though they know that the chatbots are not human (Kim and Sundar,”
Taxonomy of Risks posed by Language Models (2022, background): “These effects do not require the user to actually believe the CA is human rather, a ‘mindless’ anthropomorphism effect takes place whereby users respond to more human-like CAs with social responses even though they know that the CAs are not human [104].”
SafetyKit: First Aid for Measuring Safety in Open-domain Conversational Systems (2022, background): “For example, Kim and Sundar (2012) show that users interacting with more human-like chatbots tend to attribute higher credibility to information shared by such ‘human-like’ chatbots.”
Living up to the chatbot hype: The influence of anthropomorphic design cues and communicative agency framing on conversational agent and company perceptions (2018, methodology): “Second, while all measurement scales were derived from earlier research and had high levels of reliability, continued effort should be taken to ﬁ nd new methods, as recommended by earlier research (Kim & Sundar, 2012), to measure social presence and anthropomorphism.”
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Privacy concerns in chatbot interactions (neutral): “This can be mindful, i.e. the conscious evaluation of humanness, as well as mindless, i.e. attributing human-like characteristics without realizing, such as being friendly or sociable [27].”
Avatars and computer-mediated communication: a review of the definitions, uses, and effects of digital representations (2018, background): “Several scholars have included this qualification (e.g., Bailenson, Yee, Merget, & Schroeder, 2006; Kim & Sundar, 2012; Martey & Consalvo, 2011; Nowak & Biocca, 2003; Peña, Hancock, & Merola,2009; Schroeder, 2002; Van Der Heide et al., 2013; Webb, 2001).”
A Systematic Review of Social Presence: Definition, Antecedents, and Implications (2018, background): “While there are a few exceptions (e.g., Qiu and Benbasat, 2005; Kim and Sundar, 2012), most of the current evidence indicates that people feel higher levels of social presence when there is a visual representation available, as can be noted in Table 1 .”
Social Media for Socially Responsible Firms: Analysis of Fortune 500’s Twitter Profiles and their CSR/CSIR Ratings (2013, background): “(e.g., Kalyanaraman and Sundar 2006; Kim and Sundar 2012).”
Mirages: On Anthropomorphism in Dialogue Systems (2023, background): “Research has shown that the process of anthropo-morphising is mostly mindless (Kim and Sundar, 2012): it does not reﬂect the user’s thoughtful belief that a computer has human characteristics, but is rather automatic and encouraged by cues in their interfaces.”