Show Me Yours if I Show You Mine: Self-disclosure in Conversational Agents

Self-disclosure describes the act of revealing personal information to others; in other words, revealing a part of one’s own identity. Implementing a form of self-disclosure in conversational agents, including social robots, might contribute to the user’s feeling of engagement and stimulate them to reveal more information about themselves. This paper addresses whether self-disclosure in dialogue of conversational agents could benefit interaction with the user and how dialogue scripts should be designed. We also briefly discuss our own use case, an embodied conversational agent able to talk with older adults about their well-being.