The Impact of Linguistic and Cultural Congruity on Persuasion by Conversational Agents

Abstract

Abstract. We present an empirical study on the impact of linguistic and cultural tailoring of a conversational agent on its ability to change user attitudes. We designed two bilingual (English and Spanish) conversational agents to resemble members of two distinct cultures (Anglo-American and Latino) and conducted the study with participants from the two corresponding populations. Our results show that cultural tailoring and participants' personality traits have a significant interaction effect on the agent's persuasiveness and perceived trustworthiness.

The cultural influence model: when accented natural language spoken by virtual characters matters

“…In another line of work, Yin et al (2010) report that individuals who process information using peripheral cues were influenced by and trusted an agent tailored to their own culture. Yin et al had two female agents; one Latina and the other Anglo.…”

Does it matter if a computer jokes

“…In the health domain, Yin, Bickmore, and Cortes [14] designed embodied conversational agents that resembled users' ethnic identities by making one appear Latino and another Anglo-American. They also varied whether the agents spoke Spanish or English (implemented via a run-time text-to-speech engine).…”

Culture-Related Topic Selection in Small Talk Conversations across Germany and Japan

“…An approach that takes different topics into account in order to simulate differences in cultural background is presented by Yin et al [14]. For their study, two different virtual characters were designed, one representing a member of the Anglo-American culture and one resembling a member of the Latino culture.…”