An agent that voices politeness through actual compromises, not just words, earns more satisfaction and intent to keep collaborating from users, even though it is less effective at improving their decisions.

Abstract

We present an interactive virtual agent that employs politeness strategies to suggest compromises during a joint decision-making task with a human partner. In our approach, politeness is expressed not only through language, but also through the agent’s willingness to compromise by proposing options that better align with the human partner’s preferences. We conducted a within-participant experiment (n = 97) in which users interacted with two types of agents: a performance-optimizing agent and a socially considerate agent. The former prioritized decision quality, while the latter occasionally made socially motivated quality concessions to the user as a form of face-work to defer to the human partner. Our results show that participants reported higher satisfaction with the final decision and consistent intention to collaborate with the socially considerate agent on both tasks. However, the social agent was less effective than the performance-optimizing agent at improving the users’ initial decisions. These findings highlight trade-offs in human-agent interaction between optimizing task performance and managing the social dynamics of collaboration. We conclude by discussing the ethical and cultural considerations that may be involved in navigating this trade-off.