Study of a conversational agent system encouraging "real" answers of individuals in a group of acquaintances

Persuasion is an attempt of changing individual's behaviors and attitudes. Computer systems which incorporate with an embodied agent can be effective persuasive user interface as a social actor; and we developed and evaluated the persuasive application software which was named "iDetective" as the previous work. The main persuasive strategy of the iDetective was conversations including questions between users and an agent. However, as the result of the user study, those who answered to the question just by curiosity can be decrease the precision of the persuasion. In this research, we focused on the existence of other individuals based on theories related to relationship with other individuals by disclosing answers of one individual to others. Also, we evaluated our method by developing and using a web-based application where a user can have conversation with an agent. As a result, although boredom due to the scarcity of the conversation has more affected than the observation by other members, such disclosure was accepted by most of participants in the settings of this research and we found grounds of further study using the existence of others as a design strategy in the aspect of persuading individuals to provide their real opinion or situation.