Trustworthiness in Conversational Agents: Patterns in User personality-Based Behavior Towards Chatbots

As artificial intelligence conversational agent (CA) usage is increasing, research has been done to explore how to improve chatbot user experience by focusing on user personality. This work aims to help designers and industrial professionals understand user trust related to personality in CAs for better human-centered AI design. To achieve this goal, the study investigates the interactions between users with diverse personalities and AI chatbots. We measured participant personalities with a Hogan and Champagnes (1980) typology assessment by categorizing personality dimensions into the extraversion vs. intuition (EN), extraversion vs. sensing (ES), introversion vs. intuition (IN), and introversion vs. sensing (IS) groups. Twenty-nine participants were assigned two tasks to engage with three different AI chatbots: Cleverbot, Kuki, and Replika. Their conversations with the chatbots were analyzed using the open-coding method. Coding schemes were developed to create frequency tables. Results of this study showed that EN personality participants had perceptions of high trustworthiness towards the chatbot, especially when the chatbot was helpful. The ES personality participants, on the other hand, often engaged in brief conversations regardless of whether the chatbot was helpful or not, leading to low trust levels towards the chatbot. The IN personality users experienced mixed outcomes; while some had perceived trusty-worthy conversations despite having unhelpful chatbot responses, others found helpful conversations, yet a perception of low trustworthiness. The IS personality participants typically had the longest conversations, often leading to high perceptions of high trust scores being given to the chatbots. This study indicates that users with diverse personalities have different perceptions of trust toward AI conversational agents. This research provides interpretations of different personality users’ interaction patterns and trends with chatbots for designers as design guidelines to emphasize AI UX design.

@article{Wang2024,
  title     = {Trustworthiness in Conversational Agents: Patterns in User personality-Based Behavior Towards Chatbots},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {15},
  number    = {12},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Jieyu Wang and Merary Rangel and Mark Schmidt and Pavel Safonov},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2024.0151203},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2024.0151203}
}