Exploring the Effects of Head-Mounted Augmented Reality on Helping Behaviour

Augmented Reality (AR) can alter environments and steer attention. While prior work dominantly focuses on exploring performances of augmentations, this work aims to understand the societal impact of AR in complex social situations. Focusing on prosocial helping behaviour, we created two scenarios and designed five augmentations aiming to motivate a user to help. We wanted to understand (1) the impact on situation perception and (2) the impact on the social structure. In an online video experiment (n=294), we found that augmenting can impact anxiety about the situation and significantly increase the perceived reason to help being directed towards the augmentation. Similarly, we found that the helped rated the "reason" and "thankfulness" significantly higher towards AR than the helper, creating a disagreement around agency and responsibility. We discuss the implications of AR in complex social structures and how responsibility and agency will become important when embedding AR in our social lives.