An Analysis on Opinion Change based on Agent Intervention in Video Meetings

Abstract

In videoconferencing, it is difficult to establish the methods by which people's opinions change when an agent intervenes. In particular, it is an important research issue to understand which intervention methods brought about changes in people's opinions. In this study, we investigate the effects of an intervention on agents' discussions in videoconferencing. To this end, we first implement an agent that expresses opinions opposite to those of others and then test its effectiveness. The experiment was conducted with 14 subjects divided into two groups: one without an agent (hereafter referred to as the "no agent intervention" group) and the other with an agent (hereafter referred to as the "with agent intervention" group). Although the agent's intervention did result in a change in opinion, the results of testing the hypothesis based on statistics did not reveal the effect of the intervention. However, the small population size of this survey needs to be more appropriate for testing hypotheses based on statistics. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct further experiments with many participants as a future issue.