The Effect of Virtual Agents' Emotion Displays and Appraisals on People's Decision Making in Negotiation

摘要

There is growing evidence that emotion displays can impact people's decision making in negotiation. However, despite increasing interest in AI and HCI on negotiation as a means to resolve differences between humans and agents, emotion has been largely ignored. We explore how emotion displays in virtual agents impact people's decision making in human-agent negotiation. This paper presents an experiment (N=204) that studies the effects of virtual agents' displays of joy, sadness, anger and guilt on people's decision to counteroffer, accept or drop out from the negotiation, as well as on people's expectations about the agents' decisions. The paper also presents evidence for a mechanism underlying such effects based on appraisal theories of emotion whereby people retrieve, from emotion displays, information about how the agent is appraising the ongoing interaction and, from this information, infer about the agent's intentions and reach decisions themselves. We discuss implications for the design of intelligent virtual agents that can negotiate effectively.