Divided Presence: Improving Group Decision-Making via Pseudo-Population Increase
About
During group decision-making, a group with an imbalanced minor- ity and majority typically suffers normative bias. This bias creates socio-emotional conflict and decreases group member consent and decision power. Thus, we propose a novel video-chat system, "Di- vided Presence," which aims to reduce this bias by equalizing the apparent number of majority and minority participants using a pseudo-population increase. Members of a discussion use computer graphics avatars on monitors instead of their actual video appear- ances during communication. The apparent number of discussion members increases when two avatars are assigned to an arbitrary minority member; the avatars then speak on behalf of him or her. We evaluate the system with a three-person consensus game, where a minority member is assigned two avatars. The results show that our system increases the degree of consent among the majority participants when they finally agree to the minority opinion.
The system workflow of Divided Presence, a video chat system portrays a single user as two users. CG avatars are displayed on monitors for mediation. A is assigned to two avatars and B is assigned to another. When A speaks, the system sends voice data to B’s computer via the server. The system switches between avatars to speak in response to the pauses in A’s speech. The system also applies a voice changer to A’s voices.
Publications
Keisuke Seta, Masanori Yokoyama, Shigeo Yoshida, Takuji Narumi, Tomohiro Tanikawa, and Michitaka Hirose. 2018. Divided Presence: Improving Group Decision-Making via Pseudo-Population Increase. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 260–268. https://doi.org/10.1145/3284432.3284443 (ACM Author-Izer)