Induction of an active attitude by short speech reaction time toward interaction for decision-making with multiple agents

An interactive decision-making is useful to put our ambiguous desires into concrete through the interaction with others. However, in human-agent interaction, the agents are often not regarded as well-experienced consultants but rather as human-centered interfaces that provide information. We aimed to induce an active human attitude toward decision-making interactions with agents by controlling the speech reaction time (SRT) of the agents in order to consider the agents as reliable consultants. We conducted an experiment to investigate whether the SRT could influence the human participant's attitude. We used two kinds of agents; one had no SRT (no-SRT) and the other had a SRT of two seconds (2s-SRT). As a result, we found that the no-SRT agents could keep the participants' speech reaction times short even during the decision-making task in which the participants need time for careful consideration. In addition, from the analysis of the number of proposed categories and participant's behavior, we suggest that the participants had an active attitude toward interaction with no-SRT agents.