Assessing Human Reactions in a Virtual Crowd Based on Crowd Disposition, Perceived Agency, and User Traits

Immersive virtual environments populated by real and virtual humans provide valuable insights into human decision-making processes under controlled conditions. Existing literature indicates elevated comfort, higher presence, and a more positive user experience when virtual humans exhibit rich behaviors. Based on this knowledge, we conducted a web-based, interactive study, in which participants were embodied within a virtual crowd with complex behaviors driven by an underlying psychological model. While participants interacted with a group of autonomous humanoid agents in a shopping scenario similar to Black Friday, the platform recorded their non-verbal behaviors. In this independent-subjects study, we investigated behavioral and emotional variances across participants with diverse backgrounds focusing on two conditions: perceived agency and the crowd’s emotional disposition. For perceived agency, one group of participants was told that the other crowd members were avatars controlled by humans, while another group was told that they were artificial agents. For emotional disposition, the crowd behaved either in a docile or hostile manner. The results suggest that the crowd’s disposition and specific participant traits significantly affected certain emotions and behaviors. For instance, participants collected fewer items and reported a higher increase of negative emotions when placed in a hostile crowd. However, perceived agency did not yield any statistically significant effects.