Exploring the Effects of Chatbot Anthropomorphism and Human Empathy on Human Prosocial Behavior Toward Chatbots
This research addresses the problem of motivating human help for chatbots, which can improve chatbot performance and human well-being, though it is incremental in applying existing social frameworks to a new context.
The study investigated how chatbot anthropomorphism, such as human-like identity and emotional expression, influences human empathy and prosocial behavior toward chatbots, finding that these features increased prosocial behavior and intention with empathy as a mediator in an experiment with 244 participants.
Chatbots are increasingly integrated into people's lives and are widely used to help people. Recently, there has also been growing interest in the reverse direction-humans help chatbots-due to a wide range of benefits including better chatbot performance, human well-being, and collaborative outcomes. However, little research has explored the factors that motivate people to help chatbots. To address this gap, we draw on the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) framework to examine how chatbot anthropomorphism-including human-like identity, emotional expression, and non-verbal expression-influences human empathy toward chatbots and their subsequent prosocial behaviors and intentions. We also explore people's own interpretations of their prosocial behaviors toward chatbots. We conducted an online experiment (N = 244) in which chatbots made mistakes in a collaborative image labeling task and explained the reasons to participants. We then measured participants' prosocial behaviors and intentions toward the chatbots. Our findings revealed that human identity and emotional expression of chatbots increased participants' prosocial behavior and intention toward chatbots, with empathy mediating these effects. Qualitative analysis further identified two motivations for participants' prosocial behaviors: empathy for the chatbot and perceiving the chatbot as human-like. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding and promoting human prosocial behaviors toward chatbots.