Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 26, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 26, 2022 - Sep 20, 2022
Date Accepted: Jan 23, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Persuading Patients using Rhetoric to Improve Artificial Intelligence Adoption: Experimental Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Artificial intelligence (AI) can transform healthcare processes with its increasing ability to translate complex structured and unstructured data into actionable clinical decisions. While it has been established that AI is much more efficient than a clinician, the adoption rate has been slower in healthcare. Prior studies point out that the lack of trust in AI, privacy concerns, degrees of customer innovativeness, and perceived novelty value influences AI adoption. With AI products being promoted to patients, the role of rhetoric in influencing these factors has received scant attention.
Objective:
The main objective of this study is to examine whether the communication strategies (ethos, pathos, logos) have better success in overcoming factors that hinder AI product adoption amongst patients.
Methods:
We conducted experiments, where we manipulated the communication strategy (ethos, pathos, logos) in promotional Ads for an AI product. We collected responses from 150 participants using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were randomly exposed to a specific rhetoric-based Ad in the experiments.
Results:
Our results indicate that employing communications strategies in promoting an AI product impacts users’ trust, customer innovativeness, and perceived novelty value, leading to improved product adoption. Pathos-laden promotions improve AI product adoption by nudging users’ trust (N=52, ß = 0.532, P < .001) and perceived novelty value of the product (N = 52, ß = 0.517, P = .001). Similarly, ethos-laden promotions improve AI product adoption by nudging customer innovativeness (N = 50, ß = 0.465, P < .001). Likewise, logos-laden promotions improve AI product adoption by alleviating trust issues (N = 48, ß = 0.657, P < .001).
Conclusions:
Promoting AI products to patients using rhetoric-based Ads can aid with overcoming factors that hinder AI adoption by assuaging user concerns about using a new AI agent in their care process.
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.