Technological advances have enabled firms to automate customer service by employing artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. Despite their many potential benefits, interactions with chatbots may still feel machine‐like and cold. The current study proposes the use of humour by chatbots as a gateway to humanizing them and thereby enhancing the customer experience. Across three experimental studies, the results reveal that (i) the use of humour enhances service satisfaction when it is used by a chatbot but not when it is used by a human agent, (ii) this chatbot humour effect is serially mediated by enhanced perceptions of anthropomorphism and interestingness of the interactions with the chatbot, and (iii) whilst both positively and negatively valenced chatbot humour may enhance the interestingness of the interactions, socially appropriate (i.e., affiliative) humour as opposed to inappropriate (i.e., aggressive) humour leads to enhanced service satisfaction. This study extends the understanding of the humanization processes of chatbots and provides guidelines for how firms should use chatbot humour to positively influence consumers' service satisfaction.
College students walking in the hallways of their school were asked by three female confederates to donate money into a canister to benefit a national charity. Confederates were dressed in “preppy” attire for half of the trials and in “messy” attire for the remaining trials. Each confederate approached 60 subjects (30 under each condition of dress) to request donations. Analysis indicated that the requester's attire significantly affected giving. Both male and female subjects were more likely to donate when the confederate was well-dressed. These findings support and extend earlier data with adults and with nonaltruistic requests; implications for charitable endeavors are drawn. Suggestions for research are also provided.
Social cognition research suggests that incidental, environmental stimuli (e.g., business suits) can nonconsciously influence the degree to which behavioral dispositions (e.g., competitiveness) are expressed. Similarly, cognitive research suggests that incidental action-related objects (e.g., hammers) can prime action plans that then affect the speed with which a concurrent, intended action (e.g., power grip) is executed. However, whether incidental stimuli can instigate actions that run counter to one's current goals has yet to be determined. Moving beyond indirect effects, we show that such stimuli can directly cause the expression of undesired actions: Incidental stimuli resembling musical notation caused the systematic expression of unintended key presses in musicians, but not in nonmusicians. Moreover, the effect was found even when targets and distracters bore no apparent perceptual or semantic relation. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of action production and for social-cognitive concepts (e.g., applicability) regarding the limits of nonconscious processing.Can the objects that once held "stimulus control" over us (e.g., tools or musical notation) reexert their influence against our will in a novel context? For example, when flicking a switch in a tool shed with one hand, can the movements of the other, "idle" hand be influenced by the mere presence of the tools comprising the visual scene? Although these questions have never been addressed empirically, convergent findings from social psychology, cognition, and neuropsychology
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