Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jul 19, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 31, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 19, 2023
The effects of expressing empathy/autonomy-support by a COVID-19 vaccination chatbot: an experimental study in the sample of Belgian adults
ABSTRACT
Background:
Chatbots are increasingly used to support COVID-19 vaccination programs. Their persuasiveness may depend on the nature of the conversation they have with their users.
Objective:
To investigate the interaction effect of expressing empathy/autonomy-support by COVID-19 vaccine chatbots and the actual quality of answers provided by the chatbots.
Methods:
An experiment with 196 individuals who engaged in a conversation with a chatbot providing vaccination information, varied the degree to which the chatbot expressed its empathy and support for user autonomy. Chatbot conversation quality was assessed through the actual conversation logs. Perceived user autonomy (PUA), chatbot patronage intention (CPI), and vaccination intention shift (VIS) were measured after the conversation.
Results:
There occurred a negative interaction effect of chatbot empathy/autonomy-support expression and conversation fallback (percentage of chatbot answers "I do not understand." in a conversation) on PUA. Specifically, empathy/autonomy-support expression had a more negative effect on PUA and indirect effects on CPI and VIS via PUA when the conversation fallback was higher.
Conclusions:
The findings suggest that expressing empathy/autonomy-support by a chatbot may harm its evaluation and persuasiveness when the actual chatbot answers are not capable of providing empathy and do not support user autonomy. The paper adds to the literature on vaccine chatbots by exploring the conditional effects of chatbot empathy/autonomy-support. The results guide policymakers, and chatbot developers dealing with vaccination promotion in designing the way chatbots express their empathy and support for user autonomy.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.