Reflecti-Mate: A Conversational Agent for Adaptive Decision-Making Support Through System 1 and System 2 Thinking
For designers of decision-support systems, this work demonstrates the benefit of adapting to individual thinking styles to promote holistic reflection, though the effect is incremental over existing approaches.
This paper presents a conversational agent that adapts to users' thinking profiles to support integration of cognitive, emotional, and intuitive processes in decision-making. In a study with 128 participants, the agent fostered more personalized reflective trajectories and integrative language compared to a baseline agent.
Making high-stakes personal decisions involves cognitive, emotional, and intuitive processes, and individuals differ in how they allocate attention across these modes. Integration of these processes has shown to benefit decision making. Yet, most current decision-support systems focus primarily on supporting cognitive aspects, rather than adapting to the individual's thinking profile to support integration of different types of thoughts. In this study, we investigate an agent designed to encourage integration by adapting to the individual user's thought patterns. We explore its effects on participants' perceptions of the agent and their reflective behavior, in comparison with unaided pre-reflection and a baseline agent. In a between-subjects study (N = 128), our agent, which fostered broad and elaborated thinking, enabled more personalized reflective trajectories, elicited more integrative reflective language, and was perceived as providing stronger support for holistic reflection. In contrast, the baseline agent produced homogenized profiles dominated by cognitive language across participants.