Work

Enhancing Self-Efficacy in Health Self-Examination through Conversational Agent's Encouragement

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Health self-examination, such as checking for changes to skin moles, is key to identifying potential negative changes to one's body. A major barrier to initiating a self-examination is a perceived lack of confidence or knowledge. In this study, we use a 2 × 2 between-subjects design to evaluate the effect of an AI conversational agent (CA) on participant self-efficacy and trust. We manipulated both participants' perceived skill in self-examination (based on prior perceived Success vs. Failure) and the CA's verbal persuasions (Encouraging vs. Neutral), with participants asked to complete a series of skin self-assessment tasks. Our findings show that participants' self-efficacy increased when exposed to encouraging CA persuasion. Additionally, we observed that an encouraging CA significantly increased participants' trust scores in perceived benevolence compared to a neutral-sounding CA. Our results inform the design of CAs to support users' independent self-examination.

Source: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713142

Authors: Naja Kathrine Kollerup, Maria-Theresa Bahodi, Samuel Rhys Cox, Niels van Berkel

Institution: Aalborg University

Language: English

Topic: Social Robot Interaction and HRI

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: Innovationsfonden