| Abstract [eng] |
Nowadays, organizations are widely using anthropomorphized chatbots, which imitate human behavior, emotions, or feelings (Costa & Ribas, 2019). The anthropomorphism of chatbots is increasingly becoming a subject of scientific research, but there is a noticeable lack of research analyzing the impact of stereotypes on user responses and research of this interaction in emotionally charged situations. Users tend to attribute more community-reflecting qualities to chatbots with feminine appearance, such as warmth (Borau et al., 2021), empathy, and friendliness (Stroessner et al., 2019), and perceive them as more humanlike (Borau et al., 2021) and soothing users' negative emotions (Liang et al., 2023). However, users tend to trust male chatbots more and share information with them more freely (Behrens et al. 2018; and Law et al. 2020). In this paper, Fiske’s (1999) stereotype content model is used as a theoretical basis to analyze users’ responses to stereotypical anthropomorphism in chatbots. The model identifies two main dimensions: warmth and competence, which can be used to classify people’s stereotypical beliefs about other individuals and user responses (Halkias and Diamantopoulos, 2020; Bastiansen et al., 2022). The aim of this study is to empirically test the hypothesized relationships between the effects of stereotypical and non-stereotypical anthropomorphism in chatbots on users’ responses in emotionally stressful situations. The study revealed that stereotypical anthropomorphism does not have a greater positive impact on user responses, expressed in trust, perceived helpfulness of chatbots, and intentions to use the chatbot in the future. According to the findings of this study, interactions with stereotypically anthropomorphized chatbots (female exhibiting warmth and male exhibiting competence) did not lead to higher perceived self-congruence between user’s and chatbot’s personalities compared to interactions with non-stereotypically anthropomorphized chatbots. Study also revealed that the perceived self-congruence between user’s and chatbot’s personalities has a positive impact on user responses, expressed in trust, perceived helpfulness of chatbots, and intentions to use chatbot in the future. In addition, it was found that competence traits in the verbal expression of the anthropomorphized chatbot are more positively associated with trust than warmth traits, and there is a more positive relationship between the competence, used in the verbal expression of the chatbot and the intention to use chatbots in the future, than between warmth in the verbal expression and the aforementioned response element of the chatbots. Also, based on the obtained results, warmth traits in the verbal expression of the anthropomorphized chatbot did not have a more positive association with the perceived helpfulness of the chatbot than competence traits. |
