Acceptability and Trustworthiness of Virtual Agents by Effects of Theory of Mind and Social Skills Training

We constructed a social skills training system using virtual agents and developed a new training module for four basic tasks: declining, requesting, praising, and listening. Previous work demonstrated that a virtual agent's theory of mind influences the building of trust between agents and users. The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of trustworthiness, acceptability, familiarity, and likeability on the agents' theory of mind and the social skills training contents. In our experiment, 29 participants rated the trustworthiness and acceptability of the virtual agent after watching a video that featured levels of theory of mind and social skills training. Their ratings were obtained using self-evaluation measures at each stage. We confirmed that our users' trust and acceptability of the virtual agent were significantly changed depending on the level of the virtual agent's theory of mind. We also confirmed that the users' trust and acceptability in the trainer tended to improve after the social skills training.