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Anouk Samantha Bergner
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Bergner
First name
Anouk Samantha
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anouk.bergner@unisg.ch
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+41 71 224 7708
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PublicationDesigning Relatable AI: A Theory of Mind Perspective of How Conversational AI Shapes Technology-Mediated Consumer BehaviorAs technology is evolving to appear progressively more human-like, next generation conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is profoundly impacting human-technology relationships. Conversational interfaces (CIs) effectively mimic human conversation in either written (as with chatbots) or spoken form (as with digital voice assistants), taking over a broad range of tasks from acting as personal assistants, to selling products to consumers, or recommending investment strategies in the financial industry. Despite this fascinating and broad range of applications, one unifying element across the evolving conversational AI landscape is the ability to interact with consumers in what was previously considered the hallmark of humanity: language and dialogue. This raises foundational questions of how consumers perceive progressively more humanized AI, as well as the behavioral consequences for consumers. This dissertation develops a novel theoretical framework of human-technology relationships in the context of conversational AI, building on and integrating fundamental research on the theory of mind in psychology, foundational principles of human dialogue in linguistics, and emerging literature on technology-mediated consumer behavior. The framework and the underlying hypotheses are developed and tested in four independent paper projects, across a broad range of methodological approaches (deep contextual language models and experimental research designs), study settings (both in the field and the lab), and participant samples (from financial investors to online shoppers). Together, these papers demonstrate how interacting with conversational AI fundamentally shapes consumer decision-making and assess the underlying psychological mechanisms and moderating factors influencing the formation of intimacy and trust with such interfaces (and the brands or firms they represent). Furthermore, they provide novel methodological avenues, compared to traditional consumer research, to unobtrusively identify variations in the attribution of a mind to these interfaces. The overarching objective of this dissertation is to contribute to an emerging and interdisciplinary field of research on how humans relate to and are influenced by increasingly humanized AI in a digitally transforming society.Type: doctoral thesis