The term "believability" is often used to describe expectations concerning virtual agents. In this paper, we analyze which factors influence the believability of the agent acting as the software assistant. We consider several factors such as embodiment, communicative behavior, and emotional capabilities. We conduct a perceptive study where we analyze the role of plausible and/or appropriate emotional displays in relation to believability. We also investigate how people judge the believability of the agent, and whether it provokes social reactions of humans toward it. Finally, we evaluate the respective impact of embodiment and emotion over believability judgments. The results of our study show that (a) appropriate emotions lead to higher perceived believability, (b) the notion of believability is closely correlated with the two major socio-cognitive variables, namely competence and warmth, and (c) considering an agent as believable can be different from having a human-like attitude toward it. Finally, a primacy of emotion behavior over embodiment while judging believability is also hypothesized from free responses given by the participants of this experiment.

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A successful theory of conditional reasoning requires an account of how reasoners recognize the pragmatic function a conditional statement is meant to perform. Situations in which it is ambiguous whether a conditional statement was meant to add information or to correct a mistake are discussed in this article. This ambiguity has direct consequences on the way reasoners update their beliefs and derive conclusions. In an analysis of ambiguity from the perspective of politeness theory, the authors suggest that any contextual factor that increases the face threat of a correction will encourage reasoners to construe the ambiguous conditional as a correction. This construal will impact their beliefs about the piece of information that is ambiguously corrected, and their beliefs will affect the deductive conclusions they are willing to draw. This nested mediation structure was observed in 2 experiments. The first experiment manipulated the threat level of a correction through the portrayed personality of the person being corrected; the second experiment manipulated the affective distance between the corrector and the corrected.

Ambiguous statements are quite frequent in everyday life and are therefore the subject of numerous theoretical and empirical investigations. This article explores the interpretation of ambiguous request/disagreement statements such as "I am afraid I do not follow you" in the light of utilitarian and face-management approaches. It offers a combined test of some key predictions of these two approaches on an original kind of ambiguity between two contrasting indirect interpretations. The results support the utilitarian approach, offer new perspectives on the facework approach, and suggest that this combined approach can be generalized to a large range of ambiguous statements.