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24-11-2021 | S.I.: Artificial Speakers - Philosophical Questions and Implications

Trust Me on This One: Conforming to Conversational Assistants

Authors: Donna Schreuter, Peter van der Putten, Maarten H. Lamers

Published in: Minds and Machines | Issue 4/2021

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Abstract

Conversational artificial agents and artificially intelligent (AI) voice assistants are becoming increasingly popular. Digital virtual assistants such as Siri, or conversational devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home are permeating everyday life, and are designed to be more and more humanlike in their speech. This study investigates the effect this can have on one’s conformity with an AI assistant. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch’s already demonstrated the power and danger of conformity amongst people. In these classical experiments test persons were asked to answer relatively simple questions, whilst others pretending to be participants tried to convince the test person to give wrong answers. These studies were later replicated with embodied robots, but these physical robots are still rare. In light of our increasing reliance on AI assistants, this study investigates to what extent an individual will conform to a disembodied virtual assistant. We also investigate if there is a difference between a group that interacts with an assistant that communicates through text, one that has a robotic voice and one that has a humanlike voice. The assistant attempts to subtly influence participants’ final responses in a general knowledge quiz, and we measure how often participants change their answer after having been given advice. Results show that participants conformed significantly more often to the assistant with a human voice than the one that communicated through text.

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Title: Trust Me on This One: Conforming to Conversational Assistants
Authors: Donna Schreuter
Peter van der Putten
Maarten H. Lamers
Publication date: 24-11-2021
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Minds and Machines / Issue 4/2021
Print ISSN: 0924-6495
Electronic ISSN: 1572-8641
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-021-09581-8

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