Do we trust artificial
intelligence agents to mediate conflict? Not entirely.
New study says we'll
listen to virtual agents except when goings get tough
University of Southern California –
October 16, 2019 -- We may listen to facts from Siri or Alexa, or directions
from Google Maps or Waze, but would we let a virtual agent enabled by
artificial intelligence help mediate conflict among team members? A new study
says not just yet.
Researchers from USC and the University
of Denver created a simulation in which a three-person team was supported by a
virtual agent avatar on screen in a mission that was designed to ensure failure
and elicit conflict. The study was designed to look at virtual agents as
potential mediators to improve team collaboration during conflict mediation.
Confess to them? Yes. But in the heat of
the moment, will we listen to virtual agents?
While some of researchers (Gale Lucas
and Jonathan Gratch of the USC Viterbi School Engineering and the USC Institute
for Creative Technologies who contributed to this study), had previously found
that one-on-one human interactions with a virtual agent therapist yielded more
confessions, in this study "Conflict Mediation in Human-Machine Teaming:
Using a Virtual Agent to Support Mission Planning and Debriefing," team
members were less likely to engage with a male virtual agent named
"Chris" when conflict arose.
Participating members of the team did
not physically accost the device (as we have seen humans attack robots in viral
social media posts), but rather were less engaged and less likely to listen to
the virtual agent's input once failure ensued and conflict arose among team
members.
'The study was conducted in a military
academy environment in which 27 scenarios were engineered to test how the team
that included a virtual agent would react to failure and the ensuring conflict.
The virtual agent was not ignored by any means. The study found that the teams
did respond socially to the virtual agent during the planning of the mission
they were assigned (nodding, smiling and recognizing the virtual agent 's input
by thanking it) but the longer the exercise progressed, their engagement with
the virtual agent decreased. The participants did not entirely blame the virtual
agent for their failure.
"Team cohesion when accomplishing
complex tasks together is a highly complex and important factor," says
lead author, Kerstin Haring, an assistant professor of computer science at the
University of Denver.
"Our results show that virtual
agents and potentially social robots might be a good conflict mediator in all
kinds of teams. It will be very interesting to find out the interventions and
social responses to ultimately seamlessly integrate virtual agents in human
teams to make them perform better."
Study co-author, Gale Lucas, Research
Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC, and a researcher at the
Institute for Creative Technologies, adds that some feedback from study
participants indicates that they perceived virtual agents to be neutral and
unbiased. She would like to continue the work to see if virtual agents can be
applied "to help us make better decisions" and press "what it
takes to have us trust virtual agents."
While this study was conducted in a
military academy with particular structures, the researchers are hoping to
develop this project to improve team processes in all sorts of work
environments.
[University of Southern California.
"Do we trust artificial intelligence agents to mediate conflict? Not
entirely: New study says we'll listen to virtual agents except when goings get
tough." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 16 October 2019.]
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