Agreeable People Like Agreeable Virtual Humans

  • Authors:

  • Sin-Hwa Kang;Jonathan Gratch;Ning Wang;James H. Watt

  • Affiliations:

  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Social and Behavioral Research Laboratory, , USA NY 12180;Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, USA CA 90405;Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, USA CA 90405;Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Social and Behavioral Research Laboratory, , USA NY 12180

  • Venue:
  • IVA '08 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This study explored associations between the five-factor personality traits of human subjects and their feelings of rapport when they interacted with a virtual agent or real humans. The agent, the Rapport Agent, responded to real human speakers' storytelling behavior, using only nonverbal contingent (i.e., timely) feedback. We further investigated how interactants' personalities were related to the three components of rapport: positivity, attentiveness, and coordination. The results revealed that more agreeable people showed strong self-reported rapport and weak behavioral-measured rapport in the disfluency dimension when they interacted with the Rapport Agent, while showing no significant associations between agreeableness and self-reported rapport, nor between agreeableness and the disfluency dimension when they interacted with real humans. The conclusions provide fundamental data to further develop a rapport theory that would contribute to evaluating and enhancing the interactional fidelity of an agent on the design of virtual humans for social skills training and therapy.