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Introduction
Publications
Publications (274)
Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, scientists around the globe have engaged in science communication to an unprecedented degree to convey first-hand epidemiological knowledge and information on preventive measures. The present work is aimed at empirically investigating the impact of direct exposure to scientists as compared to general COVID-19-related...
Over the last few years, political advertisers have moved with their audiences: to social media platforms. Advertisers on these platforms aim to persuade voters by sending messages tailored to them based on their own data: political microtargeting (PMT). A considerable problem with PMT is that users are often unaware that they are being targeted, w...
Increasingly, reenacted representations of historical figures can be found on social media aiming to make the past more tangible. Here, producers employ a first-person perspective which is known for fostering the experience of parasocial interaction (PSI). Following the assumption that social interactions promote the development of empathy and mora...
People’s perception of privacy can primarily be directed to themselves or to the value of privacy for society. Likewise, privacy protection can repel both individual and collective privacy threats. Focusing on this distinction, the present article examines Internet users’ privacy protection behaviors in relation to individual privacy concerns and t...
Historical figures were increasingly brought onto Instagram providing insights into the past from a first-person perspective by nonverbally and verbally addressing followers in stories or posts. This type of representation is known for promoting parasocial interaction (PSI), the illusion of a face-to-face interaction with a media figure. Consequent...
Although the appraisal of online incivility highly depends on the social context in which it occurs, little research has focused on this aspect. Drawing on the general aggression model, we assumed that the appraisal of and the reaction to an uncivil discussion comment is affected by the represented stance and the appearance of accompanying comments...
Robots are used in various social interactions that require them to be perceived as credible agents (e.g., as product recommenders in shopping malls). To be rated credible (i.e., competent, trustworthy, and caring) a robot’s mentalizing abilities have shown to be beneficial because they allow a robot to infer users’ inner states, thus serving as a...
Two studies investigated the effects of exposure to disinformation on citizens’ evaluation of politicians and the impact of corrections. Study 1 tested the roles of message valence and relational closeness of social media connections sharing disinformation. Study 2 examined whether corrections on social networking sites could mitigate the influence...
The privacy calculus assumes that people weigh perceived privacy risks and benefits before disclosing personal information. So far, empirical studies investigated the privacy calculus on a between-person level and, therefore, were not able to make statements about the intrapersonal psychological processes. In the present preregistered online within...
Since social robots are rapidly advancing and thus increasingly entering people’s everyday environments, interactions with robots also progress. For these interactions to be designed and executed successfully, this study considers insights of attribution theory to explore the circumstances under which people attribute responsibility for the robot’s...
Privacy behaviors are described to be situationally dynamic. While most privacy studies rely on cross-sectional analyses, it is important to investigate these dynamics within persons. In the present study, we will focus on the adoption of a COVID-19 contact tracing app as this was shown to be a privacy calculus-based decision and the pandemic situa...
Zusammenfassung
Die Nutzung des Internets führt auf der einen Seite zu unzähligen Erleichterungen des täglichen Lebens, kann auf der anderen Seite allerdings auch zu Verletzungen der persönlichen Privatsphäre führen, da viele Firmen private Daten der Nutzenden sammeln. Noch sind Nutzende allerdings primär selbst in der Verantwortung, diese Privathe...
Source credibility is known as an important prerequisite to ensure effective communication (Pornpitakpan, 2004). Nowadays not only humans but also technological devices such as humanoid robots can communicate with people and can likewise be rated credible or not as reported by Fogg and Tseng (1999). While research related to the machine heuristic s...
Real-time communication, unlimited distribution of information, and the lack of editorial supervision in social media communication aggravate recipients’ credibility evaluations and information selection by what aspects of the source such as expertise have emerged as important anchors for evaluations. It has long been assumed that credibility judgm...
Voice assistants (VAs) are available in the family context and are easy to interact with. Due to the opaqueness of these assistants, however, children in particular might be unaware of potential negative consequences (e.g., with regard to privacy). To gain a deeper understanding of children’s knowledge about VAs, of how to facilitate knowledge rega...
Twenty years ago, we reflected on the potential of psychological research in the area of embodied conversational agents and systematized the variables that need to be considered in empirical studies. We gave an outlook on potential and necessary research by taking into account the independent variables behavior and appearance of the embodied agent,...
Using privacy-protecting tools and reducing self-disclosure can decrease the likelihood of experiencing privacy violations. Whereas previous studies found people’s online self-disclosure being the result of privacy risk and benefit perceptions, the present study extended this so-called privacy calculus approach by additionally focusing on privacy p...
Although much has been published regarding street protests on social media, few works have attempted to characterize social media users’ spatial behavior in such events. The research reported here uses spatial capture-recapture methods to determine the influence of the built environment, physical proximity to protest location, and collective postin...
In recent years, live streaming websites have evolved into popular meeting places for people interested in video games. While earlier research found that the joint playing of online video games might foster social capital, watching an individual streamer playing seems to be a non-social experience. However, the corresponding live chat might offer t...
When designing a virtual agent, implementing empathy is a factor that can be considered to maximize the quality of human-agent interaction. However, in a globalized world, it is important to scrutinize whether users’ culture affects the perception of empathic agents. This study investigated the role of users’ cultural background in the perception o...
Previous research focused on differences between interacting with a person-controlled avatar and a computer-controlled virtual agent. This study however examines an aspiring form of technology called agent representative which constitutes a mix of the former two interaction partner types since it is a computer agent which was previously instructed...
The unique physical embodiment of robots enables physical contact between machines and humans. Since interpersonal touch research has demonstrated that touch has several positive behavioral (e.g., reduced stress, better immune functioning) as well as evaluative consequences (e.g., better evaluation of the initiator of touch), the question arises wh...
In this work, we challenge the assumption that weak ties play uniquely important social support roles on social network sites, particularly regarding informational support. To overcome methodological limitations of earlier research, we present a mixed-methods study. Forty-one participants were interviewed and asked to identify five weak, medium, an...
Despite incivility in online discussions being linked to various negative effects, less is known about the mechanisms of how incivility works. So far, explanations by social perception have been neglected. Therefore, drawing on the multiple inference model, this study employs an attribution theoretical approach to examine whether the motives and tr...
Although much has been published regarding street protests on social media, few works have attempted to characterize social media users' spatial behavior in such events. The research reported here uses spatial capture-recapture methods to determine the influence of the built environment, physical proximity to protest location, and collective postin...
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, physical distancing is necessary to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. To compensate for the lack of social encounters, people have been advised to connect with others via digital communication channels. Drawing on a psychological framework combined with assumptions from communication science, we therefore investiga...
In the last 10 years, many canonical findings in the social sciences appear unreliable. This so-called “replication crisis” has spurred calls for open science practices, which aim to increase the reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability of findings. Communication research is subject to many of the same challenges that have caused low re...
Digital technologies are exerting a growing influence on the lives of children and teenagers: from video monitoring of babies and educational robots in nursery school to AI-powered learning assistants used to guarantee individual success in education. However, issues relating to privacy, surveillance and data protection are seldom reflected on with...
People are increasingly applying Internet of Things (IoT) devices that help them improve their fitness and provide information about their state of health. Although the acceptance of healthcare devices is increasing throughout the general population, IoT gadgets are reliant on sensitive user data in order to provide full functioning and customized...
Although the need to understand the mechanisms of disinformation correction has been recognized, research on the effects of different forms of correcting messages is still scarce. Based on assumptions of the continued influence effect, we tested in a 2 (detailed versus simple correction) × 2 (immediate versus belated correction) between-subjects ex...
Since social robots are increasingly entering areas of people’s personal lives, it is crucial to examine what affects people’s perceptions and evaluations of these robots. In this study, three potential influences are examined: 1) the robot’s level of interaction skills, 2) the robot’s expected future role as a helpful assistant or a threatening co...
Privacy policies provide Internet users with the possibility to inform themselves about websites’ usage of their disclosed personal data. Strikingly, however, most people tend not to read privacy policies because they are long and cumbersome, indicating that people do not wish to expend much (cognitive) effort on reading such policies. The present...
Studies found that using digital media can satisfy the needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness, contributing to well-being and enjoyment. Further, need satisfaction in daily life has been identified as a background factor that may influence the intensity of media usage, as well as the psychological outcomes connected to it. Considering both...
Background
Assistive technologies have become more important owing to the aging population, especially when they foster healthy behaviors. Because of their natural interface, virtual agents are promising assistants for people in need of support. To engage people during an interaction with these technologies, such assistants need to match the users´...
Mobile technologies offer new opportunities for the creation and development of systems for crisis communication and management. Vital to the success of using smartphone-based technology for volunteers is to determine whether privacy issues affect user participation. Thus, an online experiment (N = 217) addressing volunteers or people interested in...
Addressing gaps in existing research, the current laboratory experiment (n = 139) examined the role that social facets play in the video gaming experience that multiplayer first-person shooter games provide. First, three different social settings of playing were compared concerning the amount of enjoyment and well-being they induced and second, a s...
Disinformation on the Internet has become a major threat to our society. Especially false and inaccurate information in the form of news might have detrimental consequences for the democratic process when biasing individuals’ political views. To combat disinformation, a necessary first step is to investigate the factors relevant for individuals to...
False information on social media poses a crucial threat to our society, and calls for interventions to combat this problem are becoming louder. Users themselves may have the potential to diminish the impact of misleading information. In an online experiment with a 3 x 3 between-subjects design (credibility evaluation in user comments: positive vs....
The present study examined whether peer comments on video-sharing platforms can influence the emotional reactions toward entertaining videos. This question is especially relevant with regard to meaningful videos known to increase prosocial motivation and reduce stereotypes. In a 3x3x2 between-subjects online experiment (N = 732), we varied the type...
Smart technology in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) that extensively gathers user data in order to provide full functioning has become ubiquitous in our everyday life. At the workplace, individual’s privacy is especially threatened by the deployment of smart monitoring technology due to unbalanced power relations. In this work we argue tha...
Research on technology usage and acceptance has demonstrated that women and men use technology differently, and also differ in their self-perception regarding technology (e.g., women see themselves as less capable). Gender role beliefs, according to which women are expected to be less interested in and less capable of using technologies than men, h...
Humans have the urge to self-disclose, which is nowadays often satisfied on social media platforms. While the affordances of contemporary social media applications help to indulge this urge, they also pose a significant challenge. People are usually good at leveraging self-disclosure in a way that gratifications are increased and disadvantages are...
The aim of this chapter is to provide a framework which structures different aspects that might positively and negatively influence the sensations nonliving sexual partners might evoke in order to guide future empirical research in the investigation of sexual responses toward machines. For this purpose, influential concepts from media psychology, h...
Artificial agents are becoming prevalent across human life domains. However, the neural mechanisms underlying human responses to these new, artificial social partners remain unclear. The uncanny valley (UV) hypothesis predicts that humans prefer anthropomorphic agents but reject them if they become too humanlike-the so-called UV reaction. Using fMR...
In most societies, women are less likely to choose a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-related study program than men. This problem persists despite numerous initiatives aimed at fostering the uptake of STEM subjects by women, who represent an underutilized source of talent in a time of great need for STEM professionals. Many...
Co-and socially shared regulation of learning is a challenge for groups in diverse environments-offline and online (Järvelä et al., 2014). Specifically, prompting others to do their share of the work, might be challenging for interpersonal relationships. Thus, addressing the social psychological dynamics in online learning environments, an online e...
Social robots, which mostly look and behave like humans, are often perceived as somehow alive and treated similar to humans, despite the fact that they are non-living electronic devices. Based on considerations of the uncertainty reduction theory, the question arises what expectancies regarding social robots people have and what sources they use to...
Based on evolutionary psychological theories, numerous eye-tracking studies have demonstrated how people visually perceive a potential mate in order to efficiently estimate the person’s mate value. Companies are currently working on sexualized robots that provide numerous human-like visual cues which foster the visual resemblance to humans. To gain...
Nonhedonic responses to entertaining media offerings have recently attracted an extensive line of research investigating which stimuli can lead to which kind of experiences. Long-term investigations on the effects of cumulative exposure to entertaining media over time, however, remain the exception. Building on the theoretical concept of elevation...
BACKGROUND
Assistive technologies have become more important owing to the aging population, especially when they foster healthy behaviors. Because of their natural interface, virtual agents are promising assistants for people in need of support. To engage people during an interaction with these technologies, such assistants need to match the users´...
Die Privatheit der Nutzerinnen und Nutzer von Online-Shopping Angeboten ist ein relevantes Thema der heutigen digitalisierten Gesellschaft und stellt eine Herausforderung sowohl für die Wissenschaft als auch für die Politik dar. Viele Verbraucherinnen und Verbraucher sind um Ihre Privatheit besorgt, weisen jedoch unzureichendes Wissen sowie einen M...
The present study investigated the role of age in the perception of emotional nonverbal behaviors of a virtual assistant in a 2 (seniors vs young participants) x 2 (happy vs sad situations) x 4 (three emotional nonverbal behaviors related to each situation vs neutral behavior) mixed factorial design. In the study, a virtual agent acted as an assist...
While first empirical studies on sexual aspects of human-robot interaction mostly focus on male users’ acceptance, there is no empirical research on how females react to robotic replications of women. To empirically investigate whether robots can evoke the same kind of jealousy-related discomfort as do other women, we conducted an online study in w...
Research demonstrated that humans are able to interpret humanlike (affective) nonverbal behavior (HNB) in artificial entities (e.g. Beck et al., in: Proceedings of the 19th IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication, IEEE Press, Piscataway, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2010.5598649; Bente et al. in J Nonverbal...
This research investigates the effect of different user characteristics on the perception and evaluation of an agent’s appearance variables. Therefore, two different experiments have been conducted. In a 3 × 3 × 5 within-subjects design (Study 1; N = 59), three different target groups (students, elderly, and cognitively impaired people) evaluated 3...
The question of whether online gaming can lead to the formation of meaningful social relationships or rather displaces real life social interactions and thus fosters isolation is still being discussed controversially. A type of game that has rarely been investigated in this context is the genre of online first-person shooters (FPS). The current stu...
In a post-truth age determined by Social Media channels providing large amounts of information of questionable credibility while at the same time people increasingly tend to rely on online information, the ability to detect whether content is believable is developing into an important challenge. Most of the work in that field suggested automated ap...
Most applications for virtual agents require the user to cooperate. Thus, it is helpful to investigate different strategies for virtual agents to evoke the user’s cooperation. In the present work ( N = 80), we experimentally tested the influence of an agent’s (non)cooperative nonverbal behavior and actual decision-making behavior on user’s cooperat...
In this work, we explore the effects of dominant nonverbal behavior of a virtual agent on users in different age groups regarding their evaluations of the system as well as persuasion. We report a bipartite experimental laboratory study with young adults (N = 87) and seniors (N = 38). In the first part of the study, young adults interacted with the...
Building on the notion that people respond to media as if they were real, switching off a robot which exhibits lifelike behavior implies an interesting situation. In an experimental lab study with a 2x2 between-subjects-design (N = 85), people were given the choice to switch off a robot with which they had just interacted. The style of the interact...
Feelings of isolation and a lack of interactivity are among the reasons cited for student drop-out in online learning settings like MOOCs. A possible solution is to offer MOOC participants the opportunity to engage in collaborative activities. However, small-group collaboration in MOOCS poses several challenges which may reduce the beneficial effec...
Current studies investigating natural human–robot interaction (HRI) in the field concentrate on the analysis of automatically assessed data (e.g., interaction times). What is missing to date is a more qualitative approach to investigate the natural and individual behavior of people in HRI in detail. In a quasi-experimental observational field study...
The perceived credibility of information plays a major role in information selection and influence (Metzger & Flanagin, 2015). Accordingly, past research has examined people's information selection and their decision outcomes, in both web and social media environments (e.g., Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015; Winter & Krämer, 2012). Yet, in spite of this r...
While first empirical studies on sexual aspects of human-robot interaction mostly focus on the male users' acceptance, there is no empirical research on how females react towards robotic replications of them. To empirically investigate whether robots can evoke the same kind of jealousy as other women do, an online study was conducted in which 848 h...
Interest in the meaningful sides of media entertainment has blossomed over the last decade, with numerous scholars examining how certain media content can enhance social good and well-being. Because social scientific work in this area is relatively new and is rapidly evolving, numerous conceptualizations of meaningful media experiences have been in...
Even though clan membership plays an important role in the context of playing first-person shooters, only little is known about the questions, what makes a clan membership attractive and what effects go hand in hand with a clan membership. The current study fills this gap by applying Self-Determination Theory to the context of playing in first-pers...
The present research investigated whether co-viewer comments in social TV interactions are able to enhance or weaken media effects. With the example of talent shows, the valence of co-viewer comments (pro/contra/none) as well as the type of content (antisocial behavior vs. conventional performance) were varied in an experiment (N = 117). Results sh...
The chapter reviews new technologies and their impact on learning and students’ motivation. The main argument is that in order to achieve immersion, social interactions should be fostered. Therefore, three technologies are discussed which either inherently draw on social interactions (pedagogical agents, transformed social interaction) or can be en...
Over the last few years, the implementation of game elements like badges in non-game environments has become increasingly popular (Butler, 2014). In this study, we tested whether badges, which could be received for successful task performance and specific activities within an e-learning course in a higher education setting, had an impact on student...
Recent developments in Internet technology offer new possibilities for individuals to communicate, consequently changing common usage patterns of the World Wide Web. With the increase in popularity of so-called social media, a growing body of research is exploring how these technologies address human needs, how individuals use social media, and whi...
Im Beitrag wird beschrieben, wie soziale Medien Einfluss auf das Alltagsleben der NutzerInnen nehmen. Aufgeführt werden empirische Erkenntnisse zu Motiven der Nutzung, Nutzungsformen sowie Wirkungen der Nutzung. Dabei werden besonders Selbstoffenbarungsprozesse und Impression Management sowie Beziehungsmanagement fokussiert. Beispielhaft werden ein...
On contemporary online news sites, readers are simultaneously exposed to journalistic articles and social reactions toward these messages. Two online experiments (N = 252) addressed whether negative user reactions can attenuate the persuasive influence of the main article, and whether these effects depend on the reputation of the original source. R...