Trusting Virtual Agents (original) (raw)

Trusting Virtual Agents: The Effect of Personality

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Article No.: 10, Pages 1 - 36

Published: 18 March 2019 Publication History

Abstract

We present artificial intelligent (AI) agents that act as interviewers to engage with a user in a text-based conversation and automatically infer the user's personality traits. We investigate how the personality of an AI interviewer and the inferred personality of a user influences the user's trust in the AI interviewer from two perspectives: the user's willingness to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer. We have developed two AI interviewers with distinct personalities and deployed them in a series of real-world events. We present findings from four such deployments involving 1,280 users, including 606 actual job applicants. Notably, users are more willing to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer with a serious, assertive personality in a high-stakes job interview. Moreover, users’ personality traits, inferred from their chat text, along with interview context, influence their perception of and their willingness to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer. Finally, we discuss the design implications of our work on building hyper-personalized, intelligent agents.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems

ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems Volume 9, Issue 2-3

Special Issue on Highlights of ACM IUI 2017

September 2019

324 pages

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 18 March 2019

Accepted: 01 September 2018

Revised: 01 September 2018

Received: 01 June 2017

Published in TIIS Volume 9, Issue 2-3

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Author Tags

  1. AI interviewer
  2. Big 5 personality
  3. chatbots
  4. computer personality
  5. conversational agents
  6. human-machine trust
  7. individual differences
  8. personality inference

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Michelle X. Zhou

Gloria Mark

University of California, Irvine, CA

Jingyi Li

University of California, Berkeley

Huahai Yang