Establishing affinity relationships toward agents: effects of sympathetic agent behaviors toward human responses

People tend to favor the opinions of those who previously made the same decisions as theirs. We conducted an experiment to investigate the effect of sharing opinions with interface agents on subsequent human behaviors. Three agents with distinctive appearances were used in the experiment. In the first stage, several questions are posed to a subject by the Presider agent, and the Agreeable agent shows explicit agreement to all of the answers by the subject, whereas the Neutral agent doesn´t show any agreement. Then, in the second stage, both the Agreeable and Neutral agents state their own opinions to a question by the Presider agent, and the subject is required to choose between the two. All possible assignments (six patterns) of the roles of Presider, Agreeable and Neutral to the three agents were included in the experiment to exclude the possibility of decisions based on subjects liking a particular agent´s appearance. The Agreeable agent was consistently in favor of the subject´s decisions. We examined how the subject indicates sympathetic responses to the Agreeable agent after he/she interacts with agents. The results showed that people tend to behave favorably toward opinions of agents that previously agreed with their decisions. This suggests that human-computer interaction has the same social dynamics as human-human interaction