Confiding in and Listening to Virtual Agents: The Effect of Personality
This addresses the problem of designing effective virtual agents for recruitment, but it is incremental as it builds on existing personality research in human-agent interaction.
The study tackled how a virtual interviewer's personality affects user behavior, finding that users are more willing to confide in and listen to a serious, assertive personality, based on data from 316 job applicants.
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.