Agent Identity and Time Perception in Government Services

This study investigates how the identity of a service agent (AI vs. human) influences users’ subjective perception of waiting time and overall satisfaction in digital government service contexts. Based on social acceleration theory, AI is often associated with instantaneity, which may heighten users’ expectations for immediacy. When such expectations are unmet due to unavoidable system delays (e.g., 30 seconds), a mismatch between identity cues and actual processing time may lead to expectancy violation and distorted time perception. The study employs a two-stage experiment to examine both the main effect of agent identity on time perception and its spillover effect on subsequent human-agent interactions.