What Causes the Differences in Communication Styles? A Multicultural Study on Directness and Elaborateness

Abstract

With the aim of designing a Spoken Dialogue System which adapts to the user's communication idiosyncrasies, we present a multicultural study to investigate the causes of differences in the communication styles elaborateness and directness in Human-Computer Interaction. By adapting the system's behaviour to the user, the conversation agent may appear more familiar and trustworthy. 339 persons from Germany, Russia, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom participated in this web-based study. The participants had to imagine that they are talking to a digital agent. For every dialogue turn, they had to read four different variants of the system output and indicate their preference. With the results of this study, we could demonstrate the influence of the user's culture and gender, the frequency of use of speech based assistants as well as the system's role on the user's preference concerning the system's communication style in terms of its elaborateness and its directness.

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