The Effectiveness of Social Influence Tactics when Used by a Virtual Agent

Research in social science distinguishes between two types of social influence: informational and normative. Informational social influence is driven by the desire to evaluate ambiguous situations correctly, whereas normative social influence is driven by the desire to be liked and gain social acceptance from another person. Although we know from research that humans can effectively use either of these techniques to persuade other humans, scholars have yet to examine the relative effectiveness of informational versus normative social influence when used by virtual agents. We report a study in which users interact with a system that persuades them either using informational or normative social influence. Furthermore, to compare agents to human interlocutors, users are told that the system is either tele-operated by a human (avatar) or fully-automated (agent). Using this design, we are able to compare the effectiveness of virtual agents (vs humans) in employing informational versus normative social influence. Participants interacted with the system, which employed a Wizard-of-Oz operated virtual agent that tried to persuade the user to agree with its rankings on a "survival task." Controlling for initial divergence in rankings between user and the agent, there was a significant main effect such that informational social influence resulted in greater influence than normative influence. However, this was qualified by an interaction that approached significance; users were, if anything, more persuaded by informational influence when they believe the agent was AI (compared to a human), whereas there was no difference between the agent and avatar in the normative influence condition.

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