Trust by Design: Trust Calibration Through Non-Advisory Socratic Dialogue in Conversational Agents

📅 2026-09-13
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🤖 AI Summary
研究通过设计非指导性苏格拉底对话的会话代理CASELy来校准用户信任,避免用户对AI系统的过度或不足依赖。
📝 Abstract
As conversational AI systems increasingly operate in sensitive domains, the central challenge shifts from usability to trust calibration, ensuring that users rely on systems neither too much nor too little. Systems that provide advice or interpretations risk encouraging inappropriate reliance, particularly when users perceive AI outputs as authoritative. We present CASELy, a conversational agent explicitly designed to limit its own authority through non-advisory Socratic dialogue. The agent asks reflective questions grounded exclusively in user input and refuses to provide advice, recommendations, or interpretations. This design operationalizes trust calibration by constraining agent agency rather than optimizing capability. In a pilot randomized controlled study with higher education students, participants interacting with the Socratic dialogue reported substantially higher user experience (UEQ-S overall = 1.50) compared to a non-dialogue control (0). Qualitative findings identify three mechanisms supporting calibrated trust: transparency through visible grounding, preservation of user decision authority, and reduced fear of judgment. We argue that appropriate reliance can be achieved through interactional constraints, offering a design pattern for trustworthy conversational AI in sensitive contexts.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

trust calibration
conversational AI
sensitive domains
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

non-advisory Socratic dialogue
trust calibration
conversational agent
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