Designing Trustworthy Product Recommendation Virtual Agents Operating Positive Emotion and Having Copious Amount of Knowledge

Anthropomorphic agents used in online-shopping need to be trusted by users so that users feel comfortable buying products. In this paper, we propose a model for designing trustworthy agents by assuming two factors of trust, that is, emotion and knowledgeableness perceived. Our hypothesis is that when a user feels happy and perceives an agent as being highly knowledgeable, a high level of trust results between the user and agent. We conducted four experiments with participants to verify this hypothesis by preparing transition operators utilizing emotional contagion and knowledgeable utterances. As a result, we verified that users' internal states transitioned as expected and that the two factors significantly influenced their trust states.