Stay away from me: Coughing increases social distance even in a virtual environment

Masahiro Shiomi; Atsumu Kubota; Mitsuhiko Kimoto; Takamasa Iio; Katsunori Shimohara

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0279717

Stay away from me: Coughing increases social distance even in a virtual environment

PLoS One. 2022 Dec 28;17(12):e0279717. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279717. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Masahiro Shiomi¹, Atsumu Kubota^{1

2}, Mitsuhiko Kimoto¹, Takamasa Iio^{1

3}, Katsunori Shimohara^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Agent Interaction Design Laboratory, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Kyoto, Japan.
² Faculty of Science and Engineering, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
³ Faculty of Culture and Information Science, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.

Abstract

This study investigated whether the coughing behaviors of virtual agents encourage infection avoidance behavior, i.e., distancing behaviors. We hypothesized that the changes in people's lifestyles in physical environments due to COVID-19 probably influence their behaviors, even in virtual environments where no infection risk is present. We focused on different types of virtual agents because non-human agents, such as robot-like agents, cannot spread a virus by coughing. We prepared four kinds of virtual agents (human-like/robot-like and male/female) and coughing behaviors for them and experimentally measured the personal distance maintained by participants toward them. Our experiment results showed that participants chose a greater distance from coughing agents, regardless of the types, and negatively evaluated them. They also chose a greater distance from male agents than from female agents.

Copyright: © 2022 Shiomi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Avoidance Learning
COVID-19*
Environment
Female
Humans
Male

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by JST Moonshot R&D Grant Number JPMJMS2011 (experiments and evaluations), and JST CREST Grant, Number JPMJCR18A1, Japan (system developments). JST Moonshot R&D provided research funding support in the form of salary for MK and MS, and JST CREST provided research funding support in the form of salary for AK and TI, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.