Honorable Mention
The present study investigates how human subjects collaborate with a computer-mediated chatbot in creative idea generation tasks. In three text-based between-group studies, we tested whether the perceived identity (i.e.,whether the bot is perceived as a machine or as a human) or the conversational style of a teammate would moderate the outcomes of participants’ creative production. In Study 1, participants worked with either a chatbot or a human confederate. In Study 2, all participants worked with a human teammate but were informed that their partner was either a human or a chatbot. Conversely, all participants worked with a chatbot in Study 3, but were told the identity of their partner was either a chatbot or a human. We investigated differences in idea generation outcomes and found that participants consistently contributed more ideas and with ideas of higher quality when they perceived their teamworking partner as a bot. Furthermore, when the conversational style of the partner was robotic, participants with high anxiety in group communication reported greater creative self-efficacy in task performance. Finally, whether the perceived dominance of a partner and the pressure to come up with ideas during the task mediated positive outcomes of idea generation also depends on whether the conversational style of the bot partner was robot- or human-like. Based on our findings, we discussed implications for future design of artificial agents as active team players in collaboration tasks.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445270
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)