There are times when consumers want chatbots to be ‘less human’

In a new study, researchers at Ohio State University in the US found that people preferred interacting with chatbots when they felt embarrassed about what they were buying online – items like anti-diarrheal medicine or, for some people, skin care products. 

“In general, research shows people would rather interact with a human customer service agent than a chatbot,” says Jianna Jin, who led the study as a doctoral student. 

“But we found that when people are worried about others judging them, that tendency reverses and they would rather interact with a chatbot because they feel less embarrassed dealing with a chatbot than a human.” 

The research was published recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, with study co-authors Jesse Walker, an Assistant Professor in marketing, and Rebecca Walker Reczek, a Professor in marketing. 

In one of the five studies conducted, researchers asked participants to imagine buying either anti-diarrheal or hay fever medication. They were given the choice between two online stores, one using chatbots and another using human customer service agents. 

When participants were told they were buying hay fever medication, which doesn’t cause most people to feel embarrassed, 91% said they would use the store that had human service agents. But when they were buying anti-diarrheal medicine, 81% chose the store with the chatbots. 

Important how ‘human’ the chatbots seemed 

Interestingly, the researchers found in other studies that it was important how ‘human’ the chatbots appeared and acted. 

Here, participants were asked to imagine buying an anti-diarrheal medicine and shown one of three chatbot icons: One with just a speech bubble and no human characteristics; a second was a chatbot with a cartoon of a human; and the third featured a profile picture of a human woman. 

The first two identified themselves as chatbots. But the one that looked like a human used more emotional language during the exchange and did not identify itself, even though it would have been clear to participants that it was also a chatbot. 

Results showed that participants were more willing to receive information about the embarrassing product from the first two chatbots than from the one that looked human.  

“It was as if the participants were proactively protecting themselves against embarrassment by assuming the chatbot could be human,” Walker explains. Other, similar, studies produced comparable results. 

Walker says the results suggest chatbots decrease embarrassment because consumers perceive chatbots as less able to feel emotions and make appraisals about people.  

Jin, who is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, believes the results suggest companies need to pay attention to the role of chatbots in their businesses. 

“Managers may not realise the importance of using chatbots when consumers have self-presentation concerns,” she emphasises. 

And as conversational AI continues to get better, it may become more difficult for consumers to tell the difference between chatbots and human service agents, Reczek says. That could be a problem for companies whose customers may prefer to interact with chatbots because of their self-presentation concerns and fears of embarrassment.