Prosodic entrainment and trust in human-computer interaction

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of findings supporting the positive relationship between entrainment and social aspects, previous research does not provide a clearly converging picture and several recent studies stress the importance of disentrainment for smooth spoken interactions. We have developed a novel scenario design to explore how prosodic entrainment relates to the trust of a human user in an avatar's ability to provide good advice. Our results with Slovak subjects suggest that 1) applications might need to boost the entrainment effect to affect trust of humans towards avatars, 2) user's sex plays a role in developing the relationship between trust and entrainment, and 3) females tend to prefer the advice of disentrainning avatars.