Observable Social Life Spaces: Exploring User Interpretations of agent-side life context in human-agent interaction

Abstract

Many AI agents are organized around instrumental "command-execution" interactions, where users primarily encounter agents through task requests and responses. Recent work on generative agents and agent life worlds has drawn attention to agents that maintain social contexts beyond direct user commands. In this paper, we study how observable social life spaces shape users' subjective experience, relational interpretations, and perceived equality during human-agent interaction. We introduce the \textit{Observable Social Life Spaces} paradigm, where agents inhabit a continuous virtual environment, engage in daily activities, and form social relationships that users can directly observe. Through an exploratory mixed-methods study ($N=24$), we found that the Observable condition yielded higher perceived-equality ratings and more frequent equality-related role descriptions than the Baseline and Unobservable conditions, but participant-level analysis suggests that the quantitative effect should be interpreted cautiously. We discuss perceived equality as a user-perception signal shaped by this design, with attention to boundary conditions including visual richness, novelty, and person-like attribution from visible agent cues.