Confiding in and Listening to Virtual Agents: The Effect of Personality

We present an intelligent virtual interviewer that engages with a user in a text-based conversation and automatically infers the user's psychological traits, such as personality. We investigate how the personality of a virtual interviewer influences a user's behavior from two perspectives: the user's willingness to confide in, and listen to, a virtual interviewer. We have developed two virtual interviewers with distinct personalities and deployed them in a real-world recruiting event. We present findings from completed interviews with 316 actual job applicants. Notably, users are more willing to confide in and listen to a virtual interviewer with a serious, assertive personality. Moreover, users' personality traits, inferred from their chat text, influence their perception of a virtual interviewer, and their willingness to confide in and listen to a virtual interviewer. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work on building hyper- personalized, intelligent agents based on user traits.

[1]  Rong Hu,et al.  Enhancing collaborative filtering systems with personality information , 2011, RecSys '11.

[2]  François Bouchet,et al.  Intelligent Agents with Personality: From Adjectives to Behavioral Schemes , 2012 .

[3]  L. Havens,et al.  Making Contact: Uses of Language in Psychotherapy , 1986 .

[4]  Colin G. DeYoung,et al.  Gender Differences in Personality across the Ten Aspects of the Big Five , 2011, Front. Psychology.

[5]  Fei Wang,et al.  Who have got answers?: growing the pool of answerers in a smart enterprise social QA system , 2014, IUI.

[6]  Martin E. P. Seligman,et al.  The Online Social Self , 2014, Assessment.

[7]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse , 1986, CL.

[8]  L. Cronbach.  Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests , 1951 .

[9]  L SidnerCandace,et al.  Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse , 1986 .

[10]  Patrick Gebhard,et al.  Exploring interaction strategies for virtual characters to induce stress in simulated job interviews , 2014, AAMAS.

[11]  D. Paulhus.  Measurement and control of response bias. , 1991 .

[12]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  Linguistic styles: language use as an individual difference. , 1999, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[13]  John P. Robinson,et al.  Measures Of Personality And Social Psychological Attitudes , 1991 .

[14]  François Bouchet,et al.  Managing Personality Influences in Dialogical Agents , 2013, ICAART.

[15]  Meng-Li Yang,et al.  Does Interviewer Personality Matter for Survey Outcomes?Evidence from a Face-to-face PanelStudy in Taiwan , 2014 .

[16]  John E. Hopcroft,et al.  An n log n algorithm for minimizing states in a finite automaton , 1971 .

[17]  GratchJonathan,et al.  It's only a computer , 2014 .

[18]  M. Ziegler,et al.  New perspectives on faking in personality assessment. , 2011 .

[19]  Lee Sproull,et al.  When the Interface Is a Face , 1996, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[20]  鈴木 聡.  Media Equation 研究の背景と動向 , 2011 .

[21]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Agents with Faces: The Effects of Personification of Agents , 1996 .

[22]  Robert C. Wolpert,et al.  A Review of the , 1985 .

[23]  Michelle X. Zhou,et al.  KnowMe and ShareMe: understanding automatically discovered personality traits from social media and user sharing preferences , 2014, CHI.

[24]  K. M. Lee,et al.  Can robots manifest personality? : An empirical test of personality recognition, social responses, and social presence in human-robot interaction , 2006 .

[25]  Gregor Mehlmann,et al.  Modeling Grounding for Interactive Social Companions , 2015, KI - Künstliche Intelligenz.

[26]  Tobias Baur,et al.  Interpreting social cues to generate credible affective reactions of virtual job interviewers , 2014, ArXiv.

[27]  Matthew Turk,et al.  Multimodal interaction: A review , 2014, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[28]  Rosalind W. Picard,et al.  Establishing the computer-patient working alliance in automated health behavior change interventions. , 2005, Patient education and counseling.

[29]  Barbara F. Okun.  Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques. Fifth Edition. , 1997 .

[30]  Tal Yarkoni.  Personality in 100,000 Words: A large-scale analysis of personality and word use among bloggers. , 2010, Journal of research in personality.

[31]  Aaron Powers,et al.  Matching robot appearance and behavior to tasks to improve human-robot cooperation , 2003, The 12th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2003. Proceedings. ROMAN 2003..

[32]  John E. Laird,et al.  The Soar Cognitive Architecture , 2012 .

[33]  Louis-Philippe Morency,et al.  It's only a computer: Virtual humans increase willingness to disclose , 2014, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[34]  T. Graepel,et al.  Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior , 2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[35]  J. M. Digman.  PERSONALITY STRUCTURE: EMERGENCE OF THE FIVE-FACTOR MODEL , 1990 .

[36]  Jeffrey Nichols,et al.  Recommending targeted strangers from whom to solicit information on social media , 2013, IUI '13.

[37]  De Ayala,et al.  The Theory and Practice of Item Response Theory , 2008 .

[38]  D. Rubin,et al.  Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM - algorithm plus discussions on the paper , 1977 .

[39]  Jeffrey Nichols,et al.  Who will retweet this?: Automatically Identifying and Engaging Strangers on Twitter to Spread Information , 2014, IUI.

[40]  Judith Masthoff,et al.  Adapting Recommendation Diversity to Openness to Experience: A Study of Human Behaviour , 2013, UMAP.

[41]  Tom Booth,et al.  The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality , 2012, PloS one.

[42]  Joseph Weizenbaum,et al.  ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine , 1966, CACM.

[43]  Marilyn A. Walker,et al.  Using Linguistic Cues for the Automatic Recognition of Personality in Conversation and Text , 2007, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[44]  Peter Lynn,et al.  The effect of interviewer experience, attitudes, personality and skills on respondent co-operation with face-to-face surveys , 2013 .

[45]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods , 2010 .

[46]  R. Cialdini.  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion , 1993 .

[47]  Sibel Adali,et al.  Predicting Personality with Social Behavior , 2012, 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining.

[48]  Barbara F. Okun.  Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques , 1976 .

[49]  Alan Wexelblat,et al.  Don't Make That Face: a report on anthropomorphizing an interface , 1998 .

[50]  Penelope Brown,et al.  Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage , 1989 .

[51]  Liad Uziel,et al.  Impression management ("lie") scales are associated with interpersonally oriented self-control, not other-deception. , 2014, Journal of personality.

[52]  Adriana Tapus,et al.  User—robot personality matching and assistive robot behavior adaptation for post-stroke rehabilitation therapy , 2008, Intell. Serv. Robotics.

[53]  J. H. Davis,et al.  An Integrative Model Of Organizational Trust , 1995 .

[54]  Justine Cassell,et al.  Small Talk and Conversational Storytelling In Embodied Conversational Interface Agents , 1999 .