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,…”

“These observations are consistent with the findings in literature (e.g., [23, 34, 41]).”

“Whereas co-presence in other literature refers to the feeling of experiencing a specific environment with another person [41], Kraus and Kibsgaard conceptualize co-presence as the result of the design decision to either mediate or not mediate the experience of co-presence [30].”

“As mentioned by Catherine et al. [32], one of the unique features that influence social presence in IVEs is the visual representation of the communication partner.”

“Research has examined cues as physical attractiveness (Antheunis & Schouten, 2011), or as evidence of interactivity, agency, and display factors in virtual environments (Oh, Bailenson, & Welch, 2018).”

“For conversational agents, social presence is the feeling and perception of interacting with a human being [138], and has been shown to increase the use of conversational agents [134], and can even increase perceived usefulness, trust, and enjoyment [84].”

“…of telepresence, transmitting only vision and audition is not very immersive or realistic and may not lead to social presence, defined as “sense of being with another in a mediated environment” [10] or the sense that another person is “real” and “there” when using a communication medium [38].”

“A particular focus has been the experience of being together with other people, or social presence Biocca et al. (2003); Oh et al. (2018).”

“Social presence gained its importance in the context of virtual reality (VR) research [15, 80, 93], where it has been used intensively [e.g., 22, 26, 51, 59].”

“…a higher level of social presence is more beneficial in contexts that involve sale activities, solving problems, facilitating decision making, offering support like in many customer service encounters where there is often no one correct outcome for a problem or situation at hand (Oh et al., 2018).”

“The concept of presence is especially relevant to the application of VR in psychotherapy (Diemer et al., 2015; Oh et al., 2018).”

“…measured the perceived realism of the avatar ’ s movement during the social interactions (Biocca et al., 2003; Felton and Jackson, 2021; Ferstl and McDonnell, 2018; Kokkinara and McDonnell, 2015; Kyrlitsias and Michael-Grigoriou, 2022; Oh et al., 2018; Sterna and Zibrek, 2021; Thomas et al., 2022).”

“…Bente et al., 2008; Nowak and Biocca, 2003) and imply dependence on other aspects of the simulation such as behavioral realism (Bailenson et al., 2005), which is generally a powerful predictor of social presence (Oh et al., 2018), such as turn-taking in a conversation (Bailenson et al., 2004).”

“SP, also synonymous with the sense of “being there”, is important in determining virtual interactions (see for instance, Oh et al., 2018) and has thoroughly been regarded in literature as a variable in examining satisfaction and learning outcomes in computer-mediated communication such as digital…”

“The benefit of virtual reality is seen in its ability to create immersive experiences that significantly enhance the user’s sense of presence—the feeling of being "there" in a digitally created environment [30].”

“For instance, in their review of the contextual factors that influence social presence, Oh et al. (2018) found that physical proximity, identity cues, and the personality/traits of virtual humans (social affordance factors) were often significant predictors of social presence.”

“For example, [44] lists three types of presence in VR, namely personal presence (also called self-presence), i.e., the feeling of “being there,” social presence (also called co-presence), i.e., the sense of “being there with others,” and environmental presence (also called physical, telepresence or…”

“Firstly, there is a terminological disagreement among the researchers which transfers into different operationalizations of the construct (Oh et al., 2018).”

“Our fi ndings also contribute to theories of presence; contrary to recent conceptualizations (e.g., Oh et al., 2018), our results suggest that copresence can and should be disentangled from other constructs that have been included in the de fi nition of copresence as a multidimensional concept.”

“…(examples for PE: Jaycox et al., 1998; Marks et al., 1998; Taylor et al., 2003; Foa et al., 2005, 2018; McDonagh et al., 2005; Schnurr et al., 2007; Pacella et al., 2011; Acierno et al., 2016; examples for EMDR: Marcus et al., 1997; Devilly et al., 1998; Power et al., 2002; Karatzias et al., 2011;…”

“2000; Lombard and Jones 2015), referring respectively to the feeling of being there and being together with others in a mediated environment (Skarbez et al. 2018; Oh et al. 2018).”

“Immersive qualities, contextual properties, and individual differences, can predict the extent to which social presence is experienced by users in VR [42].”

“…to the presence of an avatar are more representative for the responses to human presence than are those of other simulated social presences such as videotapes, images or pictorials (Hartmann et al. 2010; Oh et al. 2018; Pan and Hamilton 2018; Rubo and Gamer 2018; Yare-mych and Persky 2019).”

“Supporting the former, previous studies have shown that human-controlled “avatars” or AI with human-agency tend to result in higher levels of social presence and more social responses compared to computer-controlled agents or machine-agency AI (e.g., Fox et al., 2015; Liu, 2021; Oh et al., 2018).”

“The effectiveness of an ICT for social connectedness is largely dependent on its social presence [26, 65, 82] which is significantly enhanced by communication of nonverbal behavior [24, 82] and shared activities [29, 31, 42, 46].”

“Further, building a sense of social presence in virtual reality by increasing the realism of avatars [48, 65], strategies such as sharing personal information [48, 70], showing realistic mannerisms like nodding and blushing [48], and developing in-group associations [70] are factors that increase the experience of imm…”

“Although presence, in general, plays an important role in VR experiences, more recent studies have identified more distinct subcategories of presence, one of which is self-presence [3,75].”

“2000), on unfocused and focused interaction (Schultze and Brooks 2019), as well as on the task type and several other aspects (Oh et al. 2018).”

“[31,p.1] thatsocialpresence isreferredtoasthesubjectiveexperienceofbeingthere(i.e., inthevirtualworlds)witha“real”personand“havingaccess tohisorherthoughtsandemotions.””

“This perception relates to the so-called “social presence” (i.e., the sensation of “being there” in the virtual environment with other users), which is a crucial factor in collaborative virtual environments [18].”

“Additionally, chatbots equipped with advanced social abilities have a stronger social presence, which refers to the sense of being with a “real” person and getting to know his or her thoughts and emotions (Oh, Bailenson & Welch, 2018).”

“Most interpersonal dynamics in physical contexts get replicated in digital environments with agents and ava-tars behaving human-like (Oh, Bailenson, and Welch 2018).”

“Avatars in social VR represent real people, which can augment the feeling of social presence beyond what is typical in VR scenarios featuring non-human characters [3, 81].”

“Increased social presence that was related to supportive audiences might contribute to this effect by rendering virtual public speaking scenarios to be more similar to real-life situations 15 .”

“Many experiences in VR, such as avatar-mediated communication and embodiment, can pro fi t from the animation of nonverbal behavior of avatars (Oh et al., 2018).”

“Since the spatial audio common to most immersive environments provides a highly naturalistic vocal representation, it is nonverbal communicative functionality that is primarily at issue, such as the ability to identify one another and then recognize facial expressions and gestures [6], negotiate proxemics [7], and, wh…”

“People feel higher levels of social presence when there is a visual representation available, as the comprehensive review on social presence literature by Oh et al. shows [44].”

“As suggested by recent reviews (e.g., Aljaroodi et al., 2019; Oh et al., 2018), these factors have each produced mixed findings in past studies, warranting — if possible — a separate evaluation.”

“VR affords a wide array of social cues compared with other forms of computer mediated communication systems (Oh et al., 2018).”

“When users apply the social presence heuristic, they are more socially influenced because the salience of their interactions with media agents increases (Oh et al., 2018).”

“Users feeling physically co-located and socially connected with others is referred to as social presence (Oh, Bailenson & Welch, 2018).”

“SoE in virtual characters has been in fl uencial in studies of social presence (Mennecke et al., 2010), the perception of a “ real ” other in a virtual environment (Biocca et al., 2001; C.S.; Oh et al., 2018).”

“However, research in social presence has yet to show if photoreal-ism is an antecedent to a sense of being co-located with someone in a virtual environment (Oh, Bailenson, and Welch 2018).”

“However, as Oh et al. (2018) point out in a major review on social presence, oftentimes a higher sense of social presence is seen as an “absolute good” [52] without considering potential downsides or individual preferences.”

“Measures often used to evaluate experiences in (social) IVEs are the concepts of (i) presence, generally regarded as the sense of ‘being there’, and (ii) social presence, the feeling of being there in social exchange with a ‘real’ person [7, 22, 31].”

“This is because social presence is not only determined by the mere presence of other sentient beings, but also interactions with them which would lead to more complex inferences about their thoughts or emotions [44].”

“[42] note “this dimension of presence relates strongly to how vividly the user experiences the environmental and spatial properties of the mediated environment”.”

“The implications of reduced cue-transmissibility have been studied across a variety of domains (see review by Oh et al., 2018).”

“Future work will show whether this alienation leads to an experience of the avatar as a social presence [57].”

“…which, although it may be defined in multiple ways according to various authors, can be collectively referred to as a complete feeling of being there in the environment (Steuer 1992; Oh et al. 2018; IJsselsteijn et al. 2000; Rhee et al. 2020; Liberatore and Wagner 2021; Scavarelli et al. 2021).”

“With the aim of becoming a ‘‘Smart Thailand,’’ it required the investment to improve technology infrastructure and people competence to gain the smart and knowledge-based society (Panjaburee & Srisawasdi, 2018).”

“In a top-down process, we used previous relevant literature reviews on the topics of augmented reality [DBLS18,KBB ∗ 18], intelligent virtual agents [NKH ∗ 18], and social presence [OBW18] to come up with preliminary tags for research categories and application areas.”

“Additionally, by giving more relevant responses [16, 61] or explicitly referencing past user utterances [34, 38, 39, 57], a chatbot could increase its social presence: the feeling that it is present in the conversation [8, 50, 57].”

“Studies investigating social touch within VR often focus on collaboratively manipulating an object rather than interpersonal touch [33].”

“In contrast, social presence, although dependent on various factors such as the type of task, quality of avatars, level of interactivity, haptic feedback, etc., has been associated with a greater perception of trust in team members and perceived usefulness of team activities (Oh et al., 2018).”

“Such facilitation can be carried out by the presence of virtual characters [23,53], and they have been shown to raise people’s motivation, both intrinsically and extrinsically [19].”

“During the interaction, knowing that the system was programmed to follow human-made rules seemed to allow people to simulate its mental states and lead them to feel more knowledgeable about the decision-making process, similarly to what research has found about anthropomorphic attributes [135,136].”

“…to induce these psychological feelings; instead, they can be aroused through interacting with computer-generated characters exhibiting social cues like dialogues, gestures, appearances, facial expressions, and postures (Biocca et al., 2003; Nowak & Biocca, 2003; Oh et al., 2018; Tan & Liew, 2020).”