Evaluating a Mechanism for Explaining BDI Agent Behaviour

Michael Winikoff, Galina Sidorenko

Abstract: We conducted a survey to evaluate a previously proposed mechanism for explaining Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents using folk psychological concepts (belief, desires, and valuings). We also consider the relationship between trust in the specific autonomous system, and general trust in technology. We find that explanations that include valuings are particularly likely to be preferred by the study participants. We also found evidence that single-factor explanations, as used in some previous work, are too short.