Exploring users’ social responses to computer counseling interviewers’ behavior

•Interviewers’ higher behavioral realism elicits greater self-disclosure from users.•Interviewers’ higher behavioral realism elicits more fluent speech from users.•Interviewers’ higher self-disclosure elicits greater self-disclosure from users.

We explore the effect of behavioral realism and reciprocal self-disclosure from computer interviewers on the social responses of human users in simulated psychotherapeutic counseling interactions. To investigate this subject, we designed a 3 × 3 factorial between-subjects experiment involving three conditions of behavioral realism: high realism, low realism, and audio-only (displaying no behavior at all) and three conditions of reciprocal self-disclosure: high disclosure, low disclosure, and no disclosure. We measured users’ feelings of social presence (Copresence, Social Attraction, and Emotional Credibility), rapport, perception of the quality of users’ own responses (Embarrassment and Self-Performance), emotional state (PANAS), perception of an interaction partner (Person Perception), self-reported self-disclosure, speech fluency (Pause Fillers and Incomplete Words), and Verbal Self-Disclosure. We observed some contradictory outcomes in users’ subjective reports. However, the results of objective data analysis demonstrated that users disclosed greater Verbal Self-Disclosure (medium level of intimacy) when interacting with computer interviewers that displayed high behavioral realism and high self-disclosure. Users also delivered more fluent speech when interacting with computer interviewers that displayed high behavioral realism.