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,…”

“This may weaken the perception of collaborator presence, which is important for making immersive collaboration feel socially grounded within a shared workspace [11, 49, 41, 4, 61].”

“According to social presence theory, digital media differ in their capacity to facilitate social contact (Oh et al., 2018).”

“A visually realistic evaluator may nevertheless provide weak social-evaluative threat if its behavior appears scripted or unrelated to the participant, whereas a visually simplified evaluator may remain socially consequential when its responses appear intentional and contingent [61, 62,64,65].”

“…research, whereby ongoing conversational systems enhance the perceived presence of an interaction partner, prompting users to engage in continuous self–other perspective adjustment during interaction and thereby facilitating social-cognitive processing (Nowak and Fox 2018; Oh et al. 2018).”

“These results suggest that the AI clone’s backchanneling and nodding behaviors enhanced users’ perceptions of the avatar’s attentiveness, the realness of the interaction, and the sense of co-presence [14], as well as fostering a greater sense of closeness and engagement with the avatar.”

“Oh et al. (2018) argue that social presence is not merely a function of technological immersion; rather, it is jointly shaped by media characteristics, interaction cues, and contextual differences [14].”

“Beyond spatial presence, VR creates social presence : the sense of being with others in a virtual environment (Biocca et al., 2003; Oh et al., 2018).”

“Building on these perspectives, Social Presence Theory offers a clearer mechanism by explaining how the perceived presence of others in mediated environments shapes users’ responses [30,31].”

“Moving beyond these central constructs, the appearance of virtual teams (16) and digital transformation (15) signals that a considerable segment of the literature situates leadership within digitally mediated and organizationally reconfiguring environments.”

“…studies on social presence theory have conceptualized social presence as a general perception of the “realness” of others in mediated communication (Oh et al., 2018 ), our research conceptualizes the prospective assessment of parasocial presence through four dimensions—anticipated intimacy,…”

“…- cal and empirical work has emphasized that presence is not unitary but can be decomposed into interrelated dimensions (e.g., spatial, social, and self-presence) that describe differ - ent ways in which users “are” in a virtual environment (Lee 2004; Makransky et al. 2017; Oh et al. 2018 ).”

“…“In which modality did you feel most accompanied by the instructor?”) to directly compare the three visualization modes on these social dimensions, in line with broader conceptualizations of social presence in XR that emphasize comparative judgments across media con - figurations (Oh et al. 2018).”

“The social presence perspective emphasizes that media vary in their capacity to convey others ’ psychological availability, which directly shapes empathy, emotional understanding, and perceived intimacy (Oh et al., 2018).”

“In addition, social presence is another key component of VR environments that enables interaction [35].”

“In terms of Social Presence theory, face-to-face interactions allow for emotional closeness through nonverbal expressions and direct responses (Oh et al., 2018).”

“When AI systems use natural language, emotional phrasing or contingent turn‐taking, they can evoke a perceived social presence that encourages users to treat them as social partners (Oh et al. 2018).”

“In human relationships, consistency is a signal of trustworthiness and care; similarly, users expect long-term agents to recall prior conversations, maintain a stable personality, and adapt responsively [40, 85, 121].”

“Social presence, the sense of “being there with a real person” [3], is well established as a central perceptual quality dimension in mediated communication [4], measurable across sub-dimensions including co-presence, attentional allocation, perceived affective understanding, and behavioral…”

“SP, in turn, refers to users’ perception that others are present in the shared virtual environment [22].”

“However, most studies boost only one channel (sensory or social), leaving limited evidence—under equal geometry—for quantifying their relative and interactive effects on performance [43].”

“Similarly, media richness theory suggests that the leaner communication cues offered by chatbots, and computer-mediated human interactions are less effective for conveying authenticity [58], thus weakening disclosure intentions.”

“In VR, however, such manipulations can be confounded by factors that inflate social presence: richer avatar expressivity, gaze, or animation quality increases the credibility of social cues [19, 26, 44].”

“Padahal dalam kerangka CMC, relasi interpersonal dibangun melalui proses konstruksi pesan yang disengaja dan berkelanjutan, bukan sekadar improvisasi spontan (Fox & McEwan, 2017; Oh et al., 2018).”

“When social presence is high, an individual’s sense of psychological connections with other people in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) increases (Oh et al., 2018; Rodríguez-Ardura & Meseguer-Artola, 2016).”

“Thus, the complex effects of perceived social copresence have to be carefully considered in the current design, as in VR setups in general [33].”

“Video conferencing constrains social and emotional dimensions of communication compared to face-to-face interaction [1, 20].”

“The mirror acts as a shared frame, amplifying social presence [51] by letting users see themselves and others move in synchrony.”

“Recent work demonstrates that recent real-world experiences can influence how users interpret virtual stimuli, sometimes producing reactions-as-if-real even in low-fidelity environments [21, 22].”

“On the other hand, social presence is one of the most important aspects in communication science, especially related to the use of a communication medium where there is interaction between humans and computers (Oh, Bailenson, & Welch, 2018; Tantri, 2018).”

“Oh et al. [35] identify avatar-based representation, such as gaze, gesture, and expressive channels, as essential to maintain social presence in VR. Empirical studies further demonstrate that richer avatar expressivity and realism increase social presence and interpersonal engagement.”

“This aligns with established literature emphasizing the importance of task-related boundary conditions on social presence [53, 73, 40].”

“This concept builds on established work in psychological safety [5], situational impairment [25], and social presence research [3, 30].”

“Presence—the subjective feeling of “being there” [21, 30, 42, 46, 47, 49]—is widely used as a core evaluation metric, alongside related constructs such as co-presence [6, 33], spatial presence [5, 20, 56], and agency [20, 24].”

“…without sacrificing the progression of the game, which has broader implications for HRI group settings, such as team building exercises or therapeutic games, where tangible interaction can fortify social presence, but risks alienating users who are susceptible to social pressure [26, 67, 90, 145].”

“Short et al. argued that intimacy and immediacy are the two core components of social presence, where intimacy refers to the feeling of connectedness that communicators experience during an interaction, and immediacy is the psychological distance between them [40].”

“These behaviors included subtle book-reading animations for the human-like avatar, grooming movements for the cat avatar, and soft bouncing for the object-like avatar, enhancing social presence without introducing exaggerated or unnatural motion (Oh et al., 2018; Sinatra et al., 2021).”

“Human perception of social presence is strongly influenced by bodily movement and spatial cues [27,28].”

“2,8 When the interaction has decisional implications, high SP can support forms of overreliance, de fi ned as a tendency for uncritical reliance on the agent ’ s outputs, even in the presence of errors.”

“Users likely require a basic feeling of “being there” before higher-order social presence can emerge [79], but once that baseline is reached, social and self-related factors dominate the impact on user experience.”

“Empirical studies have confirmed that higher avatar expressivity increases perceived intimacy and rapport (Bente et al., 2008; Oh et al., 2018; Oh Kruzic et al., 2020; Kyrlitsias & Michael-Grigoriou, 2022).”

“It is common in presence scholarship to distinguish between technological and user factors (Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Lee, 2004; Kober & Neuper, 2013; Oh et al., 2018; Steuer, 1992; Sterna et al., 2024).”

“Prior work shows that gaze behavior and social presence can differ between virtual and real contexts (Blascovich et al., 2002; Oh et al., 2018; Pan & Hamilton, 2018).”

“Voice can amplify these effects by increasing social presence and perceived accuracy, a pattern observed in conversational agents and adjacent domains like autonomous systems (Grewal et al., 2020; Oh et al., 2018; Scott, 2019; Waytz et al., 2014).”

“Likewise, social presence, defined as the extent to which a medium enables users to perceive others as psychologically present (Oh et al ., 2018), is a critical factor distinguishing ISE from other single-way online shopping activities.”

“Social presence, defined as the perception of a real person in technology-mediated interaction (Oh, Bailenson, and Welch 2018; Short, Williams, and Christie 1976), is cate-gorised into intimacy and immediacy.”

“The fidelity of these cues strongly influences how participants interpret intentions, trustworthiness, and emotional states and has been related to social presence (Oh et al., 2018).”

“To address this issue, researchers have proposed various objective metrics, like proxemics or gaze behavior, which will be discussed in more detail in Section II.”

“A growing stream of research highlights the unique potential of immersive technologies, such as those associated with the metaverse, to engender a sense of social presence in the digital setting (Ghali et al., 2024; Oh et al., 2018; Van Doorn et al., 2017).”

“Social presence is often characterized as the experience of being in one place, while physically being located in another [27, 37, 52, 69, 76].”

“Experiencias que replican la vida en situaci´on de calle o la vivencia en cuerpos racializados, por ejemplo, han resultado especialmente efectivas al activar respuestas emocionales intensas, lo que refuerza la importancia de un buen dise˜no t´ecnico y narrativo para maximizar su impacto [7], [8].”