Why This and Not That? A Collaborative Reflection Approach for Understanding Thought Coverage in Decision Making Support Dialog

Abstract

Conversational agents that support reflection for decision-making often rely on adaptive dialog policies that map observed user behavior to actions such as probing, deepening, or redirecting. Yet the same pattern can reflect a range of different reasons such as deliberate prioritisation or limited self-access. By modeling the observable pattern rather than the user's reason for it, current policies risk premature assumptions about the user state and inappropriate next actions. To address this gap, we introduce a human-centered method for surfacing this hidden inference step. In a user study with 62 users and 232 collaborative moments, we pause a reflection-support agent when it would normally redirect the conversation, surface its observation, and ask users to interpret the pattern and decide how to proceed. We derive a taxonomy of nine interpretation categories and show that similar reflective states can call for substantially different follow-up actions. Our findings challenge the assumption that adaptive dialog policies can rely on observable behavior alone, and suggest how user-provided interpretations can inform more appropriate conversational actions.