Making an agent's trust stable in a series of success and failure tasks through empathy

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that incorporating empathy into AI agents stabilizes human trust over time during success and failure sequences, highlighting empathy's role in fostering reliable human-AI relationships.

Contribution

The paper provides experimental evidence that empathy in AI agents significantly stabilizes human trust across success-failure series, advancing trust-building strategies in AI design.

Findings

Empathy presence stabilizes trust over time.

Trust varies with success-failure sequences and empathy.

Empathetic agents enhance trust consistency.

Abstract

As AI technology develops, trust in AI agents 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 empathy and success-failure series to increase trust in AI agents. We experimentally examine the effect of empathy from agent to person on changes in trust over time. The experiment was conducted with a two-factor mixed design: empathy (available, not available) and success-failure series (phase 1 to phase 5). An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted using data from 198 participants. The results showed an interaction between the empathy factor and the success-failure series factor, with trust in the agent stabilizing when empathy was present. This result supports our hypothesis. This study shows that designing AI agents to be empathetic is an important factor for trust and helps humans build appropriate trust relationships with AI agents.