Artificial emotions for charity collection: A serial mediation through perceived anthropomorphism and social presence

Abstract

Despite the broad application of chatbot agents in online interactions, an ongoing debate persists regarding their persuasive role and human-like emotional disclosure. Our study adds to this debate by exploring the effect of chatbot agents’ emotional disclosure on people’s willingness to donate to a charitable cause, and by examining individual and serial mediation between the main effects of perceived anthropomorphism and social presence. To this end, two types of artificial intelligence chatbot agents—one disclosing factual information and another disclosing human-like emotion—were developed and trained using Dialogflow, a natural language processing engine. A total of 619 US residents were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing platform. Of these, 593 participants completed the required conversation with either version of the chatbot agent (factual vs. emotional), as well as the survey questionnaire, and therefore, were included in the final analysis. The participants exhibited a higher willingness to donate when they interacted with a chatbot disclosing human-like emotions than when they were only exposed to factual information. Moreover, this study found both individual and serial mediating roles of perceived anthropomorphism and social presence. Concerning the implications, theoretically, this study adds to the understanding of applying the notion of human interaction to that involving humans and chatbots. Practically, our findings can be of great help in increasing willingness to donate thereby enhancing fund-raising activities.