What happens when a Virtual Human makes a mistake? In this study we investigate the impact of a VH’s conversational mistakes in the context of persuasion. Users interacted with a VH that told persuasive information, and they were given the option to use the information to complete a problem-solving task. The VH occasionally made mistakes such as not responding, repeating the same answer, or giv...

"Doctors are frightened of malpractice" a comment recently made on his colleagues by a former director of the United States National Cancer Institute [1]. In Britain a remorseless increase in the number of actions against doctors by patients and their relatives and the cost of such actions has led to the government taking over responsibility for compensation for medical negligence [2]. In North...

A widely accepted account of causation (Lewis, 1973) asserts: (1) If F and E both occur but F would not have occurred unless E had occured, then E causes F . This obviously implies (2) One’s birth causes one’s death. an extremely odd result. But is it a counter-example? Lewis (2000) suggests that the oddness of (2) is due not to obvious falsity but to being “too obvious to be worth mentioning” ...