Extrovert Increases Consensus? Exploring the Effects of Conversational Agent Personality for Group Decision Support

Abstract

Conversational agent research has significantly shifted from solely focusing on technical capabilities to emphasizing the agent's social and conversational abilities. Previous research indicates that the agent's personality, as an essential characteristic in an agent's social and conversational behaviors, has a significant impact on user experiences. However, the role of the agent personality in a discussion process when an agent acts as a group decision facilitator has not been discussed. To fill this research gap, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz experiment with 40 participants to investigate the differences in participants' decisions after discussing with agents with two distinct personalities (i.e., introverts and extroverts). Our data showed that the extroverted agent was more effective at facilitating group decision consensus, but participants perceived the introverted agent as more useful.