Non-human Agents Research Articles

How whatsappization of the chatbot affects perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and attitude toward using in a drive-sharing task

With the advent of large language models, a spotlight has been turned onto chatbots. Utilizing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we investigated whether whatsappization of the chatbot – making the conversation more resemble a WhatsApp conversation – improves Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Usefulness, and Attitude Toward Using. In today's world, given that WhatsApp conversations sometimes substitute for face-to-face communication, borrowing this format for use in another framework was reasonable. Participants, assigned a drive-sharing task, communicated with a textual chatbot via WhatsApp and had to decide whether to take a lift to college with a driver suggested by the chatbot. Whatsappization of the chatbot was done in two ways: Through a dialog-style conversation (Dialog versus No Dialog), and by adding WhatsApp indicators – “Last Seen”, “Connected”, “Read Receipts”, and “Typing …” (Indicators versus No Indicators). The research was full factorial, with a 2 by 2 design. 120 participants were randomly assigned to one of the four groups, with 30 participants in each group. The results, using one-way ANOVAs, demonstrated that the interaction with the chatbot was longer under the Dialog compared to the No Dialog condition, and participants in the Dialog condition had a lower rating for Attitude Toward Using. In addition, both for the Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness constructs, participants' ratings were lower under the Indicators compared to the No Indicators condition. Our findings signal that whatsappization of the chatbot decreased user's motivation to use the system. Hence, the current study suggests that a non-human agent should not try to imitate a WhatsApp conversation.

A Posthumanist Reading of the Voyage in “The White Ship”

ABSTRACT This article proposes a posthumanist reading of the voyage in Lovecraft’s short story “The White Ship.” The lighthouse symbolizes anthropocentrism, but the nautical voyage, as a narrative disruption, dismantles the monopoly of anthropocentrism, and inserts the narrator into a posthumanist world. Instead of being a silent backdrop, the ocean becomes a portal to these unknown territories, and reveals itself as an agent of unpredictable forces. The forgetting of aesthetics and the denigration of technology first discard human civilization. Then, the diminution of sight, as well as the strengthening of the auditory and olfactory senses, further dismantle human monopoly, and open a gate to broaden the spectrum of nonhuman agents. Finally, the narrator goes beyond anthropocentric superiority, integrates himself into nature, and reaches the realm of posthumanist symbiosis.

Anthropomorphism and motivating participation in citizen science projects

Maintaining long-term participation in citizen science projects is challenging; thus, it is important for project developers to use effective techniques to motivate participants. One approach is to incorporate anthropomorphism (ascribing humanlike qualities to a non-human agent) when designing and deploying technology. In a quasi-experimental study conducted as part of the Citizen-Enabled Aerosol Measurements for Satellites (CEAMS) citizen science project, we investigated the relationship between anthropomorphism and motivation to participate in citizen science. Findings showed partial support for the relationship between anthropomorphism and motivation.

Six-month-old infants use cross-modal synchrony to identify novel communicative signals

Humans adopt non-linguistic signals, from smoke signals to Morse code, to communicate. This communicative flexibility emerges early: embedding novel sine-wave tones in a social, communicative exchange permits 6-month-olds to imbue them with communicative status, and to use them in subsequent learning. Here, to specify the mechanism(s) that undergird this capacity, we introduced infants to a novel signal—sine-wave tone sequences—in brief videotaped vignettes with non-human agents, systematically manipulating the socio-communicative cues in each vignette. Next, we asked whether infants interpreted new tone sequences as communicative in a fundamental cognitive task: object categorization. Infants successfully interpreted tones as communicative if they were produced in dialogues with one agent speaking (Study 1) or both agents producing tones (Study 2), or in monologues involving only a single agent (Study 3). What was essential was cross-modal temporal synchrony between an agent’s movements and the tones: when this synchrony was disrupted (Study 4), infants failed in the subsequent task. This synchrony, we propose, licensed an inference that the tones, generated by an agent, were candidate communicative signals. Infants’ early capacity to use synchrony to identify new communicative signals and recruit them in subsequent learning has implications for theory and for interventions to support infants facing communicative challenges.

포스트 시네마 환경에서의 관객 현전에 관한 연구

This study defines the diversified media environment of contemporary visual art as a post-cinema environment and analyzes how the spatial expansion of the screen and the conceptual transformation of the camera have occurred within it. By examining the altered methods of image production, mediation, and reception, the research reveals the presence of the spectator as a noncorporeal subject in the visual field of image experience. The changes in the screen and the audience have been driven by the transition to multi-screen and multimedia environments, leading to a transformation in visual perception through physical environments that interact with images in expanded spaces. Additionally, the post-cinema camera, as a non-human agency, has broadened the scope of image production and mediation through computer imaging processes and digital technologies. It not only intervenes between the unexperienced realities beyond human cognition and the audience as the experiencing subject, but also produces and mediates images for machines as machine vision, facilitating the process of converting representation into information. Furthermore, this study argues that the issue of spectator presence in the visual field can be understood through the paradox of absence and presence in the technological context of 21st-century media. It asserts that the spectator emerges as an “electronic body” that transcends the physical body in the image reception environment. The concept of the audience's electronic body introduces perspectives on the coding and informatization of the body due to technological interventions by computers and media, as well as the hybrid sensations resulting from the interaction between bodies and devices, proposing a new notion of corporeality for non-corporeal subjects in the new media environment.

Encounters with ice and snow in preschool outdoor practices – and the becoming of (un)sustainability values

ABSTRACT Wintry conditions, including ice and snow, last for six months of the year in northern Scandinavia, and thus strongly influence many preschool outdoor educational practices, but there has been little research on their impact and implications. To address this gap, we have explored preschool teachers’ experiences of everyday outdoor practices during the winter in the region. Through an analysis rooted in post-human and new materialist perspectives, we have identified human agents as well as non-human agents and their complex intra-actions between variations in ice and snow (e.g. ice-crust and sticky snow). In addition to illustrating how non-human, temporal agents may directly affect outdoor preschool practices, our study shows that diverse intra-actions in human-nature encounters play important roles in the becoming of ice, snow and associated (un)sustainable values. The results indicate a need for further critical examination of how preschool children’s outdoor encounters are framed by seasonal and climatic changes.

Humanising the Nonhuman: An Ecocritical Toolbox for Anthropomorphic Agency

Ecocriticism tends to acknowledge anthropomorphisms as a possible tool to create empathy for nonhumans, but in doing so mostly labels said tool as too sentimental for serious environmental literature. This paper aims to establish a categorisation of anthropomorphisms in media that allows a more diverse and detailed analysis of humanised nonhumans. It seeks to overcome the prevailing idea that anthropomorphic descriptions are limited to nonhuman animals and therefore extends the term to the humanisation of anything that is not human. Following the school of thought suggested by new materialism and material ecocriticism, nonhumans are regarded as having agency and anthropomorphising them allows humans to empathise with nonhumans. The categorisation of anthropomorphism proposed here is divided into each three markers and modes. The markers signify which part of the human can be observed in the anthropomorphised subject, while the modes define how this is realised. This article exemplifies the concept of markers and modes through anthropomorphic trees in literature, but as it is not a static concept, it allows for overlaps between categories and dynamic adaptations for other cases of anthropomorphised subjects. The three markers are Physicality, Sentience, and Language and may appear also in combinations. The modes are Projection, Manifestation, and Hybridity. As anthropomorphisms strongly intersect with theories of nonhuman agency, this, too, will be discussed in the final section of this article.

Watery traces and absences: sensations and speculative histories of an ancient well and a carse landscape

This paper explores how mighty earth processes, aquatic agencies and human practical, political, religious, technological, commercial and environmental interventions have shaped and reshaped a now obscure Scottish holy well and the carse landscape to which it belongs. More specifically, I detail the historic pagan rituals, vigilant religious policing, romantic redesign and extensive terraforming that have informed the changing uses and symbolic associations of these watery realms, demonstrating how they testify to ceaselessly changing human-water relations. I explore how an awareness of particular historical events garnered from diverse texts can be supplemented with affective and sensory engagements with the non-human agencies, vestiges and absences of place. Together, they foster intimations and speculative imaginaries that conjure up speculative watery histories and conjectural futures.

“We Evangelists Are Creative”: Yoruba Pentecostals’ Music-Making on Prayer Mountains in Nigeria

There is a growing interest in scholarship on the creative forms of Pentecostalism in Africa and globally. This study extends the conversation by exploring music-making in prayer mountain spirituality in Nigeria. Specifically, it examines the roles of music makers and their creative processes in prayer mountain liturgy. In addition, it discusses factors that aid creativity among music makers in the prayer mountains. Two popular prayer mountains, namely Orí-òkè Ikoyi in Ikoyi and Orí-òkè Bàbà Àbíyè in Ede, Osun State Nigeria, were selected for the study. Data for the study were generated through participant observations and interviews with music makers including prayer and song leaders as well as instrumentalists on both prayer mountains. Using the dynamic inspiration theory, the study reveals that music-making in Orí-òkè is a triadic process that is spiritually, musically, and situationally integrated. I argue that with Orí-òkè music and musicians, we can further grasp the interplay of human (social) and non-human (spiritual) agency in Pentecostal creative and musical practices.

Towards a gerontology of everything: A more-than-human perspective

Engaging with the special issue's theme of ‘The growing older of humans, non-humans and more-than-humans’, this commentary provides an overview of how social theory has engaged with the ageing body. Beginning with discussion of initial scholarship in the sociology of the body, the commentary provides thoughts on how more-than-human theory, both ‘old’ and ‘new’ materialisms, can contribute to a deeper understanding of how human bodies age alongside nonhuman living things, situated in place and space. This approach acknowledges the distributed forces, agencies and capacities that are generated with and through the relational encounters of humans with nonhuman agents as they move through the life course. The commentary ends with some suggestions for incorporating a ‘gerontology of everything’ perspective into ageing studies as a step towards more-than-human mutual flourishing.

Hybrid: Reading Godzilla Through Posthumanism

This essay proposes to read the classic cycle of Godzilla films (roughly, 1954–1995) using a posthuman perspective that makes its emphasis on animal, vegetal and mineral life. We will use posthuman and materialist philosophy to analyze hybrid monsters as part of new interdisciplinary studies about non-human agencies and their creepy potential. As such, we want to offer the first posthumanist readings of the Godzilla franchise, in time to celebrate its 70 years of existence and, in consequence, highlight how posthumanist the series has always been.

What’s Your Stake in Sustainability of AI?: An Informed Insider’s Guide

It's no secret that AI systems come with a significant environmental cost. This raises the question: What are the roles and responsibilities of computing professionals regarding the sustainability of AI? Informed by a year-long informal literature review on the subject, we employ stakeholder identification, analysis, and mapping to highlight the complex and interconnected roles that five major stakeholder groups (industry, practitioners, regulatory, advocacy, and the general public) play in the sustainability of AI. Swapping the traditional final step of stakeholder methods (stakeholder engagement) for entanglement, we demonstrate the inherent entwinement of choices made with regard to the development and maintenance of AI systems and the people who impact (or are impacted by) these choices. This entanglement should be understood as a system of human and non-human agents, with the implications of each choice ricocheting into the use of natural resources and climate implications. We argue that computing professionals (AI-focused or not) may belong to multiple stakeholder groups, and that we all have multiple roles to play in the sustainability of AI. Further, we argue that the nature of regulation in this domain will look unlike others in environmental preservation (e.g., legislation around water contaminants). As a result, we call for ongoing, flexible bodies and policies to move towards the regulation of AI from a sustainability angle, as well as suggest ways in which individual computing professionals can contribute to fighting the environmental and climate effects of AI.

Aprender a ver y sentir lo invisible:

This article describes a progressive somatic learning process that aims to produce a body sensitive enough to interact with the non-human agents promoted in New Age and neopagan spiritual practices. Contemporary rituals organized at the archeological site in Carnac, France, are the empirical research subject of this ethnography. These rituals are approached as spaces for sensory learning where participants tune into their body in order to verify the effectiveness of the techniques. As shown in the analysis, the core elements of the somatic learning applied in the rituals include the incorporation of an alternative sensory language, body techniques, visualization, and somatic imaginaries.

Episodic memory without autonoetic consciousness.

Ever since Tulving's influential 1985 article 'Memory and consciousness', it has become traditional to think of autonoetic consciousness as necessary for episodic memory. This paper questions this claim. Specifically, it argues that the construct of autonoetic consciousness lacks validity and that, even if it was valid, it would still not be necessary for episodic memory. The paper ends with a proposal to go back to a functional/computational characterization of episodic memory in which its characteristic phenomenology is a contingent feature of the retrieval process and, as a result, open to empirical scrutiny. The proposal also dovetails with recent taxonomies of memory that are independent of conscious awareness and suggests strategies to evaluate within- and between-individual variability in the conscious experience of episodic memories in human and non-human agents. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Conservation beyond biopolitics: Vulnerability and abundance in Chennai's nature‐cultures

AbstractThis paper examines the possibilities for nature in contemporary times through a ground‐up investigation of nature practices in Chennai, India. It navigates dissonant strands of scholarship on the promise of urban regions as sites of exemplary social natures with an analytical framework that examines how autonomous nonhuman life in Chennai is variously enabled and inhibited. By studying a breadth of natures and nature practices within this urban site (instead of focusing on a particular species or habitat), the paper illuminates the socio‐material processes that undermine some natures even while supporting others, highlighting paradoxical responses to nonhuman agencies and resilience within the domain of ecological concern. The simultaneous analysis of Chennai's abundant and diminishing natures explains dissonances in urban natures scholarship, while offering fresh insights on more equitable approaches to nonhuman nature in human‐dominated landscapes. Specifically, it points to the value of reconfiguring concepts and practices of nature, both within and beyond conservation, in ways that are attentive to the plural forms of nonhuman flourishing and experiential vulnerability. Any meaningful prospect for more‐than‐human futures in urbanising worlds, the paper argues, rests not on biopolitical conservation that seeks to reproduce the past or build future ecologies of ‘legitimate’ natures, but on desisting from the displacement of, and re‐allowing room – conceptual, material and ethical – for already existing natures, whether scientifically valued or unintentional, whether imperilled or flourishing.

“Saying Something Would Be Useless”: Reconsidering Relational Dialectics Theory by Examining How Chinese Women Entrepreneurs Negotiate Gendered Entrepreneurship and Family Harmony

ABSTRACT The identity of women entrepreneurs illuminates discursive struggles given the masculine norms of entrepreneurship. Applying relational dialectics theory (RDT), this study explored competing discourses surrounding understudied Chinese women entrepreneurs and the interplay of their identification and masculine discourses. I conducted narrative interviews with 34 Chinese women. Contrapuntal analysis of this non-Western data however identified that discursive struggles happened when voicing/speaking/expressing was not prioritized. Hence, I turned to new materialist perspectives to (re)work discourses as boundary-making practices producing local things/beings-in-relations and agents as anyone/anything participating in the dynamism. In two themes as competing discourses (discourses of misalignment vs. legitimacy), I focused on local movements and interferences when/where women in their entrepreneurial becoming encountered various human and nonhuman agents, and therefore demonstrated how discursive struggles involved various bodies/things, more than just talk/voices. Ultimately, this study diffracted RDT by engaging with new materialisms and proposing a new uttered-embodied dimension of discursive struggles.

Sustainable Impact of Stance Attribution Design Cues for Robots on Human–Robot Relationships—Evidence from the ERSP

With the development of large language model technologies, the capability of social robots to interact emotionally with users has been steadily increasing. However, the existing research insufficiently examines the influence of robot stance attribution design cues on the construction of users’ mental models and their effects on human–robot interaction (HRI). This study innovatively combines mental models with the associative–propositional evaluation (APE) model, unveiling the impact of the stance attribution explanations of this design cue on the construction of user mental models and the interaction between the two types of mental models through EEG experiments and survey investigations. The results found that under the influence of intentional stance explanations (compared to design stance explanations), participants displayed higher error rates, higher θ- and β-band Event-Related Spectral Perturbations (ERSPs), and phase-locking value (PLV). Intentional stance explanations trigger a primarily associatively based mental model of users towards robots, which conflicts with the propositionally based mental models of individuals. Users might adjust or “correct” their immediate reactions caused by stance attribution explanations after logical analysis. This study reveals that stance attribution interpretation can significantly affect users’ mental model construction of robots, which provides a new theoretical framework for exploring human interaction with non-human agents and provides theoretical support for the sustainable development of human–robot relations. It also provides new ideas for designing robots that are more humane and can better interact with human users.

Viewing machines as humans but humans as machines? Social connectedness shapes the robot anthropomorphism-dehumanization link

Human interactions with social robots inevitably involve anthropomorphism. Concerns have arisen regarding whether robot anthropomorphism is accompanied by negative human relationships. In particular, limited empirical research suggests that the more humanness people attribute to nonhuman agents (e.g., social robots), the more they deny to humans, thus implying a positive association between robot anthropomorphism and dehumanization. From a motivational perspective, we examined whether social connectedness—the perception of closeness with others—may expand the scope of agents deserving to be treated as having humanness, thereby tempering the possible positive association between robot anthropomorphism and dehumanization. Across three studies (two preregistered) conducted with Chinese participants, we induced social connectedness and measured anthropomorphism of social robots and dehumanization of certain individuals. Robot anthropomorphism negatively predicted dehumanization on human nature traits and the mental capacity to feel among participants induced to feel social connectedness (but not social neutrality or disconnectedness). Although their generalizability across diverse cultures warrants further investigation, our findings offer novel theoretical insights into humanness attribution, and practical implications for promoting social cohesion in the era of intelligent machines.

Blame as participant anger: extending moral claimant competence to young children and nonhuman animals

ABSTRACT Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many agents commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations.

A situational ethics and harmonization challenges in the case of EU biodiversity data governance

ABSTRACT The article discusses challenges in harmonizing biodiversity data by considering situational ethics in the valuation of data practices. Data harmonization involves technical processes for managing and governing data by linking, aligning, and binding datasets. Our study views data harmonization as a socio-technical practice encompassing both technical management and cultural contexts of data production and valuation. Using qualitative interviews, we aim to understand data harmonization through Reflexive Thematic Analysis, identifying patterns within empirical data. Our research shows data harmonization as aligning datasets and settings involving human and non-human agents within EU biodiversity data politics. Through qualitative inquiry, we explore EU biodiversity data politics as a model of biodiversity datafication, highlighting challenges and values such as learning processes for all actors, simplicity in data management, broad adoption of observation schemes, and promotion of the Western model of engaged citizenship as a good observer.