Brains or Beauty: How to Engender Trust in User-Agent Interactions

Software-based agents are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and automated. However, current technology and algorithms are still fallible, which considerably affects users’ trust and interaction with such agents. In this paper, we investigate two factors which can engender user trust in agents: reliability and attractiveness of agents. We show that it is not enough for agents to be simply reliable, they need to be attractive as well in order to encourage user interaction. Subjective user ratings of agent trust and perceived accuracy suggest that attractiveness may be even more important than reliability.