Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

With AIs becoming prevalent in our daily lives, it is still controversial whether they are a reliable conversational assistant. We, therefore, developed a chatbot, a Friendly-Bot, where users can share interpersonal experiences (e.g., friendship and romantic relationships). We then manipulated chatbot appearances into two types: robot and human-looking. We found that chatbot appearance predicted users’ trust. Participants preferred the robot-looking chatbot over the human-looking one. Participants also showed higher trust in robot-looking chatbots when conversing about positive interpersonal relationships. Participants showed a different pattern of trust depending on the appearance condition: positive experience led to higher trust in robot-looking condition, whereas the opposite was observed in human-looking condition. Our findings show how chatbot appearance influences rapport-building in AI-assisted interactions (e.g., counseling).