Developing Interpersonal Relationships with Virtual Agents through Social Instructional Dialog

Virtual pedagogical agents are used to teach skills like intercultural negotiation. In this work, we looked at how introducing social conversational strategies into instructional dialog affects learners’ interpersonal relations with such virtual agents. We discuss the development of a model for

social instructional dialog

(SID), and a comparison task informational dialog model. SID is designed to support students in taking a social orientation towards learning, through the use of conversational strategies that are theorized to produce interpersonal effects: self-disclosure, narrative, and affirmation. We discuss the implementation of these models in a virtual agent that instructs learners on negotiation and Iraqi culture. Finally, we report on the results of an empirical study with 39 participants in which we found that the SID model had significant effects on learners’ interpersonal relations with the agent. While SID engendered greater feelings of entitativity and shared perspective with the agent, it also significantly lowered ratings of trust. These findings may guide development of dialog for future agents.