Trusting Virtual Agents

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.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 18, 2019
Source ID
10.1145/3232077

Entities

People

  • Gloria Mark
  • Huahai Yang
  • Jingyi Li
  • Michelle X. Zhou

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • University of California
  • University of California, Berkeley

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Psychological Intervention/Treatment for Stress, Anxiety, PTSD, and Related Emotional and Cognitive Health Symptoms.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - DoD AI Strategy
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation