Jingyi Li 1,2, Michelle X. Zhou 2, Huahai Yang 2, Gloria Mark 3

1 UC Berkeley, 2 Juji Inc, 3 UC Irvine

During the summer of 2016, I interned at a small start-up called Juji in the South Bay. There, I designed and developed a web-based interface for recruiters/HR to sort candidates by automatically inferred personality traits, as well as a chat interface to conduct virtual interviews and where candidates could see their inferred personalities. Using this system, I helped design and run a field deployment to over 300 real job applicants, testing the effects of the personalities of both virtual agents and interviewees on trust.

A screenshot of design specifications for a chatbox
Design specification for a chatbox
A screenshot of a dashboard UI
Hifi mockup for a data visualization page
5 virtual avatars
Several different agent avatars

Materials

Paper (PDF)

Journal Paper (PDF)

Abstract

We present an intelligent virtual interviewer that engages with a user in a text-based conversation and automatically infers the user's psychological traits, such as personality. We investigate how the personality of a virtual interviewer influences a user's behavior from two perspectives: the user's willingness to confide in, and listen to, a virtual interviewer. We have developed two virtual interviewers with distinct personalities and deployed them in a real-world recruiting event. We present findings from completed interviews with 316 actual job applicants. Notably, users are more willing to confide in and listen to a virtual interviewer with a serious, assertive personality. Moreover, users' personality traits, inferred from their chat text, influence their perception of a virtual interviewer, and their willingness to confide in and listen to a virtual interviewer. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work on building hyper-personalized, intelligent agents based on user traits.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Li:2017:CLV:3025171.3025206,
 author = {Li, Jingyi and Zhou, Michelle X. and Yang, Huahai and Mark, Gloria},
 title = {Confiding in and Listening to Virtual Agents: The Effect of Personality},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22Nd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces},
 series = {IUI '17},
 year = {2017},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-4348-0},
 location = {Limassol, Cyprus},
 pages = {275--286},
 numpages = {12},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3025171.3025206},
 doi = {10.1145/3025171.3025206},
 acmid = {3025206},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords = {chatbot, computer personality, human-machine trust, individual differences, personality analytics, virtual interviewer},
}