Can virtual agents strengthen the trust of people with a migrant background in the police? A research team from the University of Würzburg investigated this question. The results surprised even those in charge.

Intelligent virtual agents can help increase the trust of people with a migrant background in institutions such as the police. This is the main conclusion of a new study by scientists at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU). Computer science professor Birgit Lugrin was responsible for this study. She holds the V chair of computer science at JMU; So-called socially interactive agents are one of his main areas of research.

The context for this study is the fact that around 24 million people with a migrant background currently live in Germany. It’s good if they also trust the local legal and government system. Positive contact with the authorities – and therefore also with the police – can play an important role in this. If a person of Turkish origin, for example, also meets a police officer of the same origin, this could play a particularly important role in strengthening trust in the authorities, according to the Würzburg research team.

Virtual agents are a profitable reinforcement

However, the proportion of employees with a migrant background in the German police is relatively low. At the same time, police often lack sufficient personnel to do more public relations work in addition to their actual duties. The use of “intelligent virtual agents” could solve this problem. For those who can’t imagine what a virtual agent is: they basically look like characters from a computer game who move around virtual worlds and behave in a human way.

“Intelligent virtual agents designed to interact with people in a natural and intuitive way are relatively inexpensive to develop and can potentially be used at scale,” says Lugrin, describing the benefits of these virtual assistants. They could therefore be a welcome addition to police public relations work. Another advantage is that agents can also be designed to look and speak very similarly to people with immigrant backgrounds.

An interactive exchange in the digital world

If virtual agents with an immigration background are really capable of strengthening the confidence of real people with the same background in the police: Lugrin and his team studied this question as part of an experimental study. They recently presented the results at the Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents.

“We developed an interactive scenario in which our participants interacted with a police officer on the computer. In one case, the virtual agents were recognizable as typically German; in the other, their appearance and language distinguished them as people of “Mixed cultural background,” Lugrin said. The test subjects themselves were all people living in Germany and of Turkish origin.

How empathetic is the digital equivalent?

Before and after the online meetings, the researchers used questionnaires to record important metrics about their participants’ attitudes toward the police. These included aspects such as trust in the police in general and the effectiveness of their work. Their assessment of the extent to which police officers act fairly and equitably towards different population groups was also recorded.

When it came to the virtual agent, the team determined how study participants perceived it. This involved aspects such as similarity, warmth, competence and empathy – and, of course, trust in the digital equivalent.

Confidence grows, in all cases

Analysis of all of this data shows that trust in the police could indeed be increased by interacting with a virtual police officer. The team, however, could not confirm one of its main hypotheses: “We expected that group similarity, i.e. identical cultural background, would have a greater positive effect on confidence”, explains Birgit Lugrin. However, in the experiments, trust increased regardless of whether the study participants encountered a “typically German” agent or an agent with an immigrant background.

However, according to Lugrin, this does not invalidate this thesis. “In psychology, a lot of research has shown that people perceive third parties more positively if they are like them,” explains the scientist. Many factors can influence what constitutes similarity, such as religion, political views or cultural background.

As a result, Lugrin is convinced that additional studies are needed to investigate this aspect in more detail. Overall, however, the key conclusion for her remains: “Virtual agents are an effective tool for positive personal interaction with authorities.”