Mirroring to Build Trust in Digital Assistants
Table 1: Significance of the difference in preferences for chatty vs. non-chatty responses per domain. There is no significant difference for timers and factual information.
['Task Domain', '[ITALIC] F-score', '[ITALIC] p-value']
The effect of mirroring on opinions of likability and trustworthiness was tested using a one-way ANOVA. We compared the participants’ trustworthiness ratings of the assistant from the pre-study (mean=4.0, stdev=0.48) and post-study (mean=4.46, stdev=0.31) surveys. Users were asked to rate how much they agreed with the statements about liking vs. not liking interacting with the assistant on a seven-point Likert scale, where one corresponds to strong disagreement, four is neutral, and seven corresponds to strong agreement (see Survey 1). The difference in the mean score pre-mirroring and post-mirroring conditions was statistically significant (f-score=7.12, p≤0.01), meaning that interacting with a style-mirroring assistant had a significant, positive impact on opinions and trustworthiness. Additionally, the task domain had a smaller, but still significant impact on whether subjects preferred chatty or non-chatty responses (f-score=2.67, p≤0.02).