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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Human-Media Interaction
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2024.1461131

Making a human's trust repair for an agent in a series of tasks through the agent's empathic behavior

Provisionally accepted
Takahiro Tsumura Takahiro Tsumura 1,2*Seiji Yamada Seiji Yamada 1,2
  • 1 Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan
  • 2 National Institute of Informatics, Chiyoda-ku, Tôkyô, Japan

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    As AI technology develops, trust in agents (including robot, AI and anthropomorphic agent) is becoming more important for more AI applications in human society. Possible ways to improve the trust relationship include empathy, success-failure series, and capability (performance).Appropriate trust is less likely to cause deviations between actual and ideal performance. In this study, we focus on the agent's empathic behavior and success-failure series to increase trust in agents. We experimentally examine the effect of empathic behavior from agent to person on changes in trust over time. The experiment was conducted with a two-factor mixed design: empathic behavior (available, not available) and success-failure series (phase 1 to phase 5).An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted using data from 200 participants. The results showed an interaction between the empathic behavior factor and the success-failure series factor, with trust in the agent repairing when empathic behavior was present. This result supports our hypothesis. This study shows that designing agents to be empathic behavior is an important factor for trust and helps humans build appropriate trust relationships with agents.

    Keywords: human-agent interaction, empathy agent, Empathy, Trust, trust repair

    Received: 07 Jul 2024; Accepted: 16 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Tsumura and Yamada. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Takahiro Tsumura, Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Hayama, 760-8521, Kanagawa, Japan

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.