Abstract
Virtual advisors (VAs) are being utilised almost in every service nowadays from entertainment to healthcare. To increase the user’s trust in these VAs and encourage the users to follow their advice, they should have the capability of explaining their decisions, particularly, when the decision is vital such as health advice. However, the role of an explainable VA in health behaviour change is understudied. There is evidence that people tend to change their intentions towards health behaviour when the persuasion message is linked to their mental state. Thus, this study explores this link by introducing an explainable VA that provides explanation according to the user’s mental state (beliefs and goals) rather than the agent’s mental state as commonly utilised in explainable agents. It further explores the influence of different explanation patterns that refer to beliefs, goals, or beliefs&goals on the user’s behaviour change. An explainable VA was designed to advise undergraduate students how to manage their study-related stress by motivating them to change certain behaviours. With 91 participants, the VA was evaluated and the results revealed that user-specific explanation could significantly encourage behaviour change intentions and build good user-agent relationship. Small differences were found between the three types of explanation patterns.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 25 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-33 |
| Number of pages | 33 |
| Journal | Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 4 Apr 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright the Author(s) 2022. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.Keywords
- Explainable agents
- Personal virtual advisor
- Reason explanation
- Behaviour change intention
- Working alliance
- Trust