Let's Be Serious and Have a Laugh: Can Humor Support Cooperation with a Virtual Agent?

A crucial goal within human-computer interaction is to establish cooperation. There is evidence that among the tools being available, humor might be a promising and not uncommon choice. The appeal of humor is supported by its fundamentality for human-human interaction and the variety of functions humor serves, for it can achieve much more than making the user smile. In the present experiment, we sought to further investigate the potential effects of humor for virtual agents. Subjects played the iterated prisoner's dilemma with a virtual agent that was intended to be funny or not. Additionally, we manipulated cooperativeness of the agent. First, although humor did not increase cooperation among subjects, our results indicate that humor modulates how cooperation is perceived in an agent. Second, humor facilitated the interaction with respect to enjoyment and rapport. Third, although increased enjoyment and overall affective reactions were both measured subjectively, the results were not in line with each other.