The Influence of the Chatbot with Personality Cues on the E-commerce User’s Perception and Behavior

• Main Authors: En-Ci Huang, 黃恩慈
• Other Authors: 游曉貞
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/khas87

碩士 === 國立臺中科技大學 === 多媒體設計系碩士班 === 107 === As artificial intelligence matures, chatbots also rise. Chatbots offer a variety of services and gradually play an important role in people''s lives. Studies have shown that in human-computer interaction, people tend to anthropomorphize computers and give them personality, and even develop social relationships or build trust. When people interact with chatbots, their personalities could have an impact on people’s perceptions and behaviors. How to shape a chatbot’s personality to enhance the user''s trust and task efficiency has become a design issue worthy of further investigation. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effect of chatbot’s personality cues on users’ perception and behavior in an electronic commerce (e-commerce) context. The study is divided into two parts: pilot study and experiment. In the pilot study, six design elements commonly used in the current chatbot’s avatars were generalized, namely hairstyle, hair color, degree of eyes detail, abstraction level, background color, and with/ without glasses. Then, eight chatbot avatar samples combining the six above-mentioned elements were selected using the Taguchi’s orthogonal arrays. Via the online questionnaires based on the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality to collect participants'' perception of each sample. The 202 questionnaires collected were analyzed by Quantification Theory Type I to understand the influence of different design elements on chatbot’s personality and to build the multiple regression equation that estimated the chatbot’s personality score. The second part is the formal experiment. Through the pilot study, the four chatbot avatars with the highest estimated score in personalities of "conscientiousness", "extraversion", "low conscientiousness" and "introverted" were selected as independent variables. Each participant interacted with one product recommender chatbot on Facebook''s Messenger platform and received online product recommendations from it. A total of 240 participants was recruited and distributed equally among the four experimental conditions. The participants'' perception of trust was measured with a questionnaire, and the click-through rate was used as a measure of participants'' behavior. According to the study results, the following conclusions are drawn: (1) Participants perceive the personality differences of chatbots based on different avatar design elements; (2) Participants would have different perceptions and behaviors when perceiving different personality of chatbots; (3) Participants have a higher perception of trust and click rate for the chatbot avatar with extraversion personality; (4) Participants have a lower perception of trust and click rate for the chatbot avatar with introverted personality. Finally, implications for design and suggestions for future work in this area are provided based on this study.