A Systematic Review of Social Presence: Definition, Antecedents, and Implications

“Studies suggest that higher levels of social presence are more beneficial in equivocal contexts wherein there is no “correct” outcome, such as negotiations (Daft and Lengel, 1986; Garau et al., 2003).”

“Incontrast to immersion, presence is the subjective experience of actually being in the mediated virtual environment (Slater and Wilbur, 1997; Witmer and Singer, 1998; Walther and Parks, 2002).”

“…with a virtual cat, view virtual humans in pain CA Canada Short et al., 1976; Nowak and Biocca, 2003 Engage in a video call with a remote participant using a telepresence robot AP Korea Choi et al., 2001 Short et al., 1976; Lombard, 1995 affordance(s) that influenced perceptions of social presence.”

“Telepresence can be defined as “the extent to which one feels present in the mediated environment, rather than in the immediate physical environment” (Steuer, 1992, p. 75).”

“Walther (1996) later expanded this theory to posit that people who communicate via text-based CMC platforms could, in some cases, achieve even higher levels of social presence than FtF interactants by carefully selecting which facets of themselves they wish to reveal (i.e., hyperpersonal model of…”

“When the perception of telepresence is strong, people should no longer be aware that their experiences are being mediated through technology (Lombard and Ditton, 1997).”

“William Gibson famously described cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” ( Gibson, 1984, p. 51), portraying the social nature of “stepping through a barrier” (Slater and Wilbur, 1997, p. 2) into the virtual environment.”

“One significant concept that was not included due to this criterion was plausibility illusion (Slater, 2009).”

“In contrast to these medium-centric views of social presence, Walther (1992) argued that individuals are capable of adapting to different communication media, and can thus achieve their communication goals accordingly.”

“…al., 2013 Gerhard et al., 2001; Bailenson et al., 2005 Interact with a virtual cat, view virtual humans in pain CA Canada Short et al., 1976; Nowak and Biocca, 2003 Engage in a video call with a remote participant using a telepresence robot AP Korea Choi et al., 2001 Short et al., 1976; Lombard,…”

“Social presence refers to “the salience of the interact-ants and their interpersonal relationship during a mediated conversation” (Oh et al. 2018, p.2).”

“For developing our theoretical framework, we combine fundamental insights of research on virtual reality (e.g., Oh et al., 2018) and RMSIs on the 2D internet (e.g., Brucks & Levav, 2022).”

“…of belonging to a meaningful learning community is emphasized as an important factor of students ’ learning experience in online learning, especially because it is difficult to make their social presence perceptible in the online environment (Joksimovi (cid:2) c et al., 2015; Oh et al., 2018).”

“SPT suggests that digital media vary in their ability to transmit social cues and thereby facilitate social presence through computer-mediated interpersonal communication (for a systematic review see Oh et al., 2018).”

“A systematic review (Oh et al., 2018) reported that approximately half of the studies surveyed showed an impact of agency on social presence, whereas in the remaining half of the studies the participants perceived similar levels of social presence regardless of the level of agency.”

“Studies in [25,26] reveal that SS interactions make students feel they are actual classmates in virtual worlds, and SI interactions provide feelings that their instructors are real people.”

“Research highlights the importance of social presence (Oh, Bailenson, & Welch, 2018), particularly in humans’ perceptions about machine agents (e.g., Spence, Westerman, Edwards, & Edwards, 2014).”

“Another important aspect of the environment is the psycho-social context, notably the social presence, i.e. the subjective experience of being in presence of a person with thoughts and emotions [111].”

“Social presence is increased when users are exposed to agents with human-like features (Oh et al., 2018).”

“…the finding of this study is the first to link the “ medium-centric social presence ” which is defined as the degree of social cues afforded by a digital environment as computer-mediated communication medium (Oh et al., 2018; Short et al., 1976; Yoo & Alavi, 2001) with multiple source effect.”

“, 1992), as well as both spatial and social presence, their measures of the latter were limited such that spatial presence was captured only through the coding of a single open-ended question related to overall user experience, while social presence—a notably multidimensional construct (Biocca et al., 2003; Cummings a…”

“Although gender is one of the most commonly examined individual factors in relation to social presence, scholars have not reached consensus on the gender effects (Oh et al., 2018).”

“…variables that contribute to higher versus lower levels of social presence and social influence in VR, including those related to the realism and agency of the virtual interaction partner and the degree of automaticity in the task being performed (Blascovich, 2002; Oh, Bailenson, & Welch, 2018).”

“As Oh et al. (2018) argued, there are a number of factors that impact social presence in an online environment, and one way to ensure presence and connection is for participants to both show their face and use eye contact.”

“In practice, there are conflicts between transparency and control, and compromises need to be made (Oh et al., 2018).”

“Furthermore, Oh et al. [38] show the potential for fidelity (i.e., visual realism) and consistency between behavioral and visual realism in pedagogical agents to be important sources of social presence and thereby possibly learning.”

“While there are many other determinants of social presence [14], not much is known about the importance of quality and naturalness of the character’s voice, although there is evidence that the close resemblance of an avatar’s voice to one’s own voice can lead to greater senses of immersion and…”

“outcomes, including trust, enjoyment, and attractiveness [53].”

“There are systematic reviews and meta-analyses conducted focusing on social presence [8, 30] and teaching presence [31], however, there is no systematic review specifically on cognitive presence.”

“Individuals experiencing (some) discomfort or unease during social interaction, or those who might feel uncomfortable in the presence of others, are likely to be less motivated to increase social interaction and connected-ness (Allmendinger 2010; Cortese and Seo 2012; Oh et al. 2018).”

“An additional avenue of future research is examining whether exposure using so-called social VR (Oh et al., 2018), that allow virtual gatherings through avatar representation of multiple users, evokes a stronger fear response, and whether the same effect can be achieved by blinding the patient to…”

“…presence mainly depends on sensory factors (e.g., visual representation of others, interactivity), or on the social context (e.g., physical proximity, social cues) (Oh et al., 2018) as well as on the task-related social interdependence between the actors (e.g., avatars) (Wienrich et al., 2018).”

“(For now, we exclude social presence, which merits an entire publication on its own, and has in fact received an excellent recent survey by Oh, Bailenson, and Welch [39].”

“Both academic researchers and practitioners are highly interested in studying the factors that increase social presence as it often predicts positive communication outcomes [25] [14] [32].”

“For mediated interactions, while there is considerable research on the construct of social presence [15, 131], there is not a widely accepted definition for a mediated genuine feeling of connection that might be facilitated by such social presence.”

“For a comprehensive account of the recent literature on social presence in VR, we encourage the reader to check [46].”

“This feeling and perception of interacting with a human being is also known as ’social presence’ [6], [14], [15].”

“Several studies have investigated the effects of the presence and the realism of the partner’s avatar in CVEs with results indicating that people feel higher levels of social presence when there is a visual representation available [20].”

“The animations represented different activities (e.g., typing on a laptop, talking to each other, moving their hands) to make them appear more life-like and recreate real-world social situations, increasing their perceived social presence [49].”

“…presence defined as ‘‘the subjective experience of being present with a ‘‘real’’ person and having access to his or her thoughts and emotions’’ 16 (p1), interactivity can increase feelings of social presence 17 through enhancing the perception that one is talking with an intelligent being…”

“This may play a key role in how the metaverse facilitates learning by providing higher degrees of social presence [37, 67, 68], enjoyment [69] and cognitive abilities [69, 70].”

“Virtual embodiment was also found to be important for distance perception [Mohler et al. 2010; Ries et al. 2008] and collaboration style [Pan and Steed 2017].”

“…(e.g. experiencing mutual gaze), and despite a lack of uniformity in definition and measurement, scholars largely acknowledge that social presence extends beyond mere mutual awareness and is in fact a multidimensional construct (see Oh et al., 2018 for a systematic review of social presence).”

“In contrast to previous research that predominantly emphasizes the positive effects of anthropomorphic robots (Blut et al. 2021; Oh, Bailenson, and Welch 2018; Yoganathan et al. 2021), this study reveals a critical insight: consumers attribute social agency to these robots with human-like social…”

“…the operationalization of these dimensions may vary, studies suggest that co-presence and social presence are closely associated with outcomes including overall satisfaction with the media (Bulu, 2012), attraction (Lee et al., 2006), and behavioral intentions (Kang and Kim, 2022; Oh et al., 2018).”

“Studies have shown that social presence is related to various positive communication outcomes, such as persuasion and attraction (Oh et al., 2018).”

“The sense of social presence increases when users perceive the robot as an agent having social attitudes and social behaviors [41, 68].”

“Although patients reported positive perceptions of this audio-only VR therapist, visually and behaviorally realistic VR therapists have been shown to evoke greater perceived presence [135].”

“3a)—the sense that one is interacting with an intentional, engaged agent (Oh et al., 2018).”

“One of the most common de fi nition of presence de fi nes it as subjective experience of being in the virtual environment (Slater and Wilbur, 1997; Oh et al., 2018).”

“Based on the various antecedents that impact social presence proposed by Oh et al. (2018), future research could explore the influences of other factors on different dimensions of social presence in live streaming commerce.”

“Socialpresence for each of the media platforms the attendees used during the conference was measured with four 5-point Likert-type items that were adapted from earlier literature (Oh et al., 2018).”

“If relevant in the context, avatars should provide mimics, one of the most important stimuli to contribute to sociality [68, 81].”

“SLRs often have a rather narrow focus on one specific delimitable characteristic or dimension, for example on Social Presence in virtual environments [143] (here the authors additionally focus on “predictors of social presence”), on technologies which support awareness in collaborative systems [120], or on explanation…”

“In addition, (bodily) acting within a virtual social context may create a sense of being together (co-presence), or interacting with others (social presence) while actually being physically remote (Short et al., 1976; Garau et al., 2005; Parsons et al., 2017; Oh et al., 2018).”

“For socially interactive robots, social presence depends on the ability to communicate expected social behaviors through the robot’s available modalities [6], [25].”

“Unlike the PC-based virtual worlds where users rely on a mouse and a keyboard to manipulate their avatars on a 2D screen [40], social VR afords embodied frst-person avatar experience and simulates “face-to-face” interactions via full-body tracking and synchronous verbal communications [47, 51, 73].”

“…initially conceptualized as the experience of emotional and psychological closeness between people during mediated communication (Short et al., 1976), or more recently as the level of perceptual salience of other social actors as “ real ” (for a review, see Cummings & Wertz, 2023; Oh et al., 2018).”