Reflecti-Mate: A Conversational Agent for Adaptive Decision-Making Support Through System 1 and System 2 Thinking

TL;DR

Reflecti-Mate is a conversational agent designed to adapt to individual thinking styles, promoting integrated decision-making processes by supporting personalized reflection and holistic thinking.

Contribution

This study introduces a novel adaptive agent that encourages integration of cognitive, emotional, and intuitive processes in decision support, tailored to individual thought patterns.

Findings

The agent fostered more personalized and elaborated reflective trajectories.

Participants used more integrative language with the agent.

The agent was perceived as better supporting holistic reflection.

Abstract

Making high-stakes personal decisions involves cognitive, emotional, and intuitive processes, and individuals differ in how they allocate attention across these modes. Integration of these processes has shown to benefit decision making. Yet, most current decision-support systems focus primarily on supporting cognitive aspects, rather than adapting to the individual's thinking profile to support integration of different types of thoughts. In this study, we investigate an agent designed to encourage integration by adapting to the individual user's thought patterns. We explore its effects on participants' perceptions of the agent and their reflective behavior, in comparison with unaided pre-reflection and a baseline agent. In a between-subjects study (N = 128), our agent, which fostered broad and elaborated thinking, enabled more personalized reflective trajectories, elicited more integrative reflective language, and was perceived as providing stronger support for holistic reflection. In contrast, the baseline agent produced homogenized profiles dominated by cognitive language across participants.