Living up to the chatbot hype: The influence of anthropomorphic design cues and communicative agency framing on conversational agent and company perceptions

By T. Araujo. 2018

979 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Disembodied conversational agents in the form of chatbots are increasingly becoming a reality on social media and messaging applications, and are a particularly pressing topic for service encounters with companies. Adopting an experimental design with actual chatbots powered with current technology, this study explores the extent to which human-like cues such as language style and name, and the framing used to introduce the chatbot to the consumer can influence perceptions about social presence as well as mindful and mindless anthropomorphism. Moreover, this study investigates the relevance of anthropomorphism and social presence to important company-related outcomes, such as attitudes, satisfaction and the emotional connection that consumers feel with the company after interacting with the chatbot.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology, Natural Language Processing, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability, Human-Computer Interaction

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Citations in the corpus

Anticipating Safety Issues in E2E Conversational AI: Framework and Tooling (2021, background): “Furthermore, research by Araujo (2018) suggests that users “see these agents as a different type of interaction partner” compared to e.g., websites and computers, or in fact LLMs – partially due to the anthropomorphic design cues of most dialog agents (Abercrombie et al., 2021).”
SafetyKit: First Aid for Measuring Safety in Open-domain Conversational Systems (2022, background): “This change in interaction style and the attribution of agency (Araujo, 2018) results in safety scenarios that are qualitatively different from LLMs: here, an inappropriate response might result in severe, or even life-threatening, consequences for the user (Bick-more et al., 2018).”
How Should My Chatbot Interact? A Survey on Social Characteristics in Human–Chatbot Interaction Design (2019, background): “In the customer services context, the chatbot needs to avoid disappointing the user, as frustration may negatively reflect the business that the agent represents (Araujo, 2018).”
Service robot implementation: a theoretical framework and research agenda (2019, background): “ChatBotX) or claims of human-like skills (Araujo, 2018).”
AI-based chatbots in customer service and their effects on user compliance (2020, background): “With few exceptions (e.g., Araujo 2018), potentials to shape customer-provider relationships by means of disembodied CAs have remained largely unexplored.”
Conversational Assistants and Gender Stereotypes: Public Perceptions and Desiderata for Voice Personas (2020, background): “(Araujo, 2018), it is beyond the scope of this paper.”
How Do AI-driven Chatbots Impact User Experience? Examining Gratifications, Perceived Privacy Risk, Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Continued Use (2020, background): “83), four items (Araujo, 2018) for social presence (α = .”
Artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced technologies and human resource management: a systematic review (2021, background): “Humanoid service robots and artificial intelligence bots, for example, are increasingly attracting industry attention (Araujo, 2018; Go & Sundar, 2019; Larivi (cid:1) ere et al., 2017; Thomaz et al., 2020).”
AI literacy and its implications for prompt engineering strategies (2024, background): “Human-like cues, such as the way language is used and the context in which AI is introduced to students, can impact how people perceive social presence as well as mindful and mindless anthropomorphism (Araujo, 2018; Munnukka, Talvitie-Lamberg, & Maity, 2022).”
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Privacy concerns in chatbot interactions (positive): “…in a human-like chatbot is expected to have the ability to in ﬂ uence mindless evaluations of humanness in particular, both in comparison to a machine-like chatbot without these anthropomorphic cues, and in comparison to a more traditional form of digital medium like an interactive website [2].”
Teachers’ attitudes towards chatbots in education: a technology acceptance model approach considering the effect of social language, bot proactiveness, and users’ characteristics (2021, background): “The increase in anthropomorphism drives a positive effect in perceived social presence, an essential factor in human-computer interactions (Araujo 2018) and a key predictor of positive attitudes and behaviours (Araujo 2018; Bente et al. 2008).”
Mirages: On Anthropomorphism in Dialogue Systems (2023, background): “By encouraging such types of engagements, developers can foster greater connection between people and systems, which increases user satisfaction (Araujo, 2018), and plays an important role in systems becoming widely accepted”