Effects of Agents Transparency on Teamwork

Abstract: The systems transparency in the field of
human-machine interaction and artificial intelligence has
seen a growth of interest. Nonetheless, there have been few
experimental studies of their effect on teamwork. We analyzed
that implicitly through a collaborative game scenario with
a mixed human-agent team. During the five rounds of a
game, the human player chooses between contributing to the team
goal (cooperate) or contributing to his individual goal (defect).
We conducted two user studies in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
(MTurk). In the first study we focused on the influence of the
agents’ strategy, while in the second study, we manipulated
the agents’ transparency. The strategy and the transparency
of the agents were examined in a between-subjects design.
The analysis regarded the comparison of the
cooperative/defect behavior of the player, the perception of
the group identification, the trust, the human likeness, the
competence and the likeability of the agents for each strategy.
The analysis of the data for the entire sample and the filtered
sample, based on the participants’ level of understanding of
the game, showed some differences. In the first case, there
were few statistically significant results, in the second, there
were promising results in the interaction effect between the
agents’ strategy and transparency.