Motivating Health Behavior Change with Humorous Virtual Agents

Research on the psychology of humor indicates that humor can increase the impact of persuasive messages in certain circumstances, suggesting that virtual agents could use humor to improve the effectiveness of motivational counseling with users. To explore this idea, we developed two virtual agents that attempt to motivate users to perform healthy behaviors - either to increase exercise or fruit and vegetable consumption - and systematically vary whether they use humor or not in their counseling conversations. Humana-uthored jokes were selected from a large corpus based on the nature of the humor (empathetic affiliative humor that serves to build relational closeness), health topic relevance, and subjective ratings of funniness, as well as relevance to user stage of behavior change. We evaluated our agents in a two-treatment counter-balanced within-subjects experiment, where participants interacted with a humorous and non-humorous agent motivating either exercise or healthy diet. We found the interaction with the humorous agent led to a significantly greater change in motivation to engage in the target behavior than interacting with the non-humorous agent.