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 x 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.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713142
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