In the Agent we trust!: The role of personality and cognition in human trust in Virtual Agents

Trust is an important factor in any relationship and within teamwork is no exception. Teammates need to trust each other to achieve common tasks effectively and efficiently. Teamwork that combines both a human and an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) has drawn much interest; nevertheless, the handling of trust between humans and IVAs is unclear. In this paper, we seek to understand how people trust an IVA teammate. The current study considers two facets of trust: personality and cognition. Our experimental study with 55 participants, involving a collaborative human-IVA task, sought to determine whether human trust in an IVA teammate is affected by the IVA’s personality and whether that differs when the IVA's personality matches the human's personality. Furthermore, we sought to understand the relative importance of personality-based versus cognitive-based facets (e.g. the information offered by the IVA) on human trust in the IVA and the resultant effect of human trust on team performance. Results indicated that cognitive-based facets played a more dominant role in establishing trust than personality-based facets. Additionally, the results showed that human trust in the IVA had a significantly positive influence on human-IVA team performance.

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