Embodied Virtual Agents (EVAs) are used today as interfaces for social robots, educational tutors, game counterparts, medical assistants, as well as companions for the elderly and individuals with psychological or behavioral conditions. Forming a reliable and trustworthy interaction is critical to the success and acceptability of this new form of interaction. In this paper, we report on a study investigating how trust is influenced by the cooperativeness of an EVA as well as an individuals prior experience with other agents. Participants answered two sets of multiple choice questions, working with a different agent in each set. Two types of agent behaviors were possible: Cooperative and Uncooperative. In addition to participants achieving significantly higher performance and having higher trust for the cooperative agent, we found that participants’ trust for the cooperative agent was significantly higher if they interacted with an uncooperative agent in one of the sets, compared to working with cooperative agents in both sets. Furthermore, we found that participants may still decide to choose agent’s suggested answer (which can be incorrect) over theirs, even if they are fairly certain their own answer is the correct one. The results suggest that trust for an EVA is relative and it is dependent on user’s history of interaction with different agents in addition to current agent’s behavior. The findings provide insight into important considerations for creating trustworthy EVAs.

如今，已实现的虚拟代理（EVA）被用作社交机器人，教育导师，游戏对口，医疗助手以及老年人和具有心理或行为状况的个人的同伴的接口。形成一种可靠和可信赖的交互方式对于这种新型交互方式的成功和可接受性至关重要。在本文中，我们报告了一项研究，该研究调查了EVA的合作以及个人与其他代理人的过往经验如何影响信任。参与者回答了两组选择题，并与每组中的不同代理人一起工作。两种类型的代理人行为是可能的：合作和不合作。除了参与者获得显着更高的绩效并获得对合作社代理人更高的信任度之外，我们发现与合作社工作相比，如果参与者在一组中与一个不合作的社员进行交互，则对合作社代理人的信任度也要高得多。两组中都有代理商。此外，我们发现，即使他们相当确定自己的答案是正确的，参与者仍可能决定选择座席的建议答案（可能不正确）。结果表明，对EVA的信任是相对的，除了当前代理的行为外，它还取决于用户与不同代理交互的历史。研究结果为创建可信赖的EVA提供了重要的考虑因素。