The Influence of users' personality on the perception of intelligent virtual agents' personality and the trust within a collaborative context

As Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) have been widely used for applications that require human interaction and collaboration, modeling an IVA that can exhibit personalities is becoming increasingly important. A large body of research has studied variant verbal and non-verbal aspects that are used to deduce an IVA's personality; however, research falls short in showing whether humans' personality influences their perception of the IVA's personality. This paper presents an empirical study that investigated whether human users can perceive the intended personality of an IVA through verbal and/or non-verbal communication, on one hand, and the influence of the user's own personality on their perception, on the other hand. Furthermore, we investigated whether the perceived personality had an impact on the human's level of trust in the IVA teammate. The results showed that similarity in personalities between humans and IVAs tended to significantly influence the humans’ correct perception of the IVA's personality and that different perceived personalities influenced the human's level of trust.17 page(s