Virtual agents and risk-taking behavior in adolescence: the twofold nature of nudging.

Peer pressure can influence risk-taking behavior and it is particularly felt during adolescence. With artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly present in a range of everyday human contexts, including virtual environments, it is important to examine whether AI can have an impact on human's decision making processes and behavior. By using the balloon analogue risk task (BART) evaluating propensity to take risk, in this study 113 adolescents' risk-taking behavior was measured when playing alone and in the presence of either a robot avatar or human avatar.