Would You Be Stressed If Anthropomorphic Agents Were Handing Out POCKET TISSUES Around Town? : Evaluation by VR Study

Part-time workers are seen handing out pocket tissues containing advertisements to pedestrians in the streets and around train stations in Japan. However, there are cases in which pedestrians feel stressed by workers handing out tissues. This is when the tissues are unnecessary for pedestrians. Workers actively try to hand out tissues to pedestrians because if they do not hand out tissues, their work will be evaluated negatively. Most pedestrians understand that refusing to accept a tissue is a betrayal of the worker’s expectations. Therefore, refusing to accept a tissue is emotionally taxing for the pedestrian. The authors believe that anthropomorphic agents handing out tissues can alleviate the aforementioned mental burden for pedestrians. In this paper, we conducted an experiment in which pedestrians interacted with a tissue-distributing worker by reproducing a typical Japanese cityscape in VR. The results showed that the anthropomorphic agent handing out tissues may cause less stress to pedestrians than a human worker handing out tissues. The results of this paper suggest the usefulness of anthropomorphic agents for tasks such as distributing advertisements in the city and around train stations, and for fundraising activities.