Anthropomorphism and customers’ willingness to use artificial intelligence service agents

ABSTRACT

Previous studies provide inconsistent evidence regarding the effect of anthropomorphism on customers’ willingness to use AI service agents. This paper explains the reason by introducing service context. Two situational experiments are used to demonstrate that under the context of high perceived control, customers expect AI service agents with more anthropomorphic designs to perform better and prefer highly human-like AI service agents. However, under the context of low perceived control, customers perceive stronger threat in facing AI service agents with more anthropomorphic designs and prefer less human-like AI service agents. Moreover, we find that this effect is significant only in social scenarios. These findings provide new insights into previous inconsistent evidence regarding anthropomorphic design’s influence on customers’ willingness to use AI service agents. Our findings also have important implications for AI service agents design in different service contexts and advance the literature on human–robot interaction and marketing.

抽象的

先前的研究提供了不一致的证据，关于拟人化对顾客使用人工智能服务代理的意愿的影响. 本文通过引入服务上下文来说明原因. 两个情境实验表明，在高感知控制的背景下，用户期望具有更拟人化设计的人工智能服务代理表现更好，并且更喜欢高度人性化的人工智能服务代理. 然而，在低知觉控制的背景下，顾客在面对更具拟人化设计的人工智能服务代理时会感受到更大的威胁，而更喜欢不那么人性化的人工智能服务代理. 此外，我们发现这种效应只在社会情境中显著. 这些发现提供了关于拟人化设计对客户使用人工智能服务代理意愿影响的不一致证据的新见解. 我们的研究结果也对不同服务环境下人工智能服务代理的设计具有重要的指导意义，并推动了有关人机交互和营销的文献.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropomorphism
• artificial intelligence (AI) service agents
• willingness to use
• performance expectation
• perceived threat

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Number: 71701166] and Social Science Planning Project of Sichuan Province of China [Grant Numbers: SC19B004 and XQ17C05].