Exploring Effects of Chatbot's Interpretation and Self-disclosure on Mental Illness Stigma

Chatbots are increasingly being used in mental healthcare - e.g., for assessing mental-health conditions and providing digital counseling - and have been found to have considerable potential for facilitating people's behavioral changes. Nevertheless, little research has examined how specific chatbot designs may help reduce public stigmatization of mental illness. To help fill that gap, this study explores how stigmatizing attitudes toward mental illness may be affected by conversations with chatbots that have 1) varying ways of expressing their interpretations of participants' statements and 2) different styles of self-disclosure. More specifically, we implemented and tested four chatbot designs that varied in terms of whether they interpreted participants' comments as stigmatizing or non-stigmatizing, and whether they provided stigmatizing, non-stigmatizing, or no self-disclosure of chatbot's own views. Over the two-week period of the experiment, all four chatbots' conversations with our participants centered on seven mental-illness vignettes, all featuring the same character. We found that the chatbot featuring non-stigmatizing interpretations and non-stigmatizing self-disclosure performed best at reducing the participants' stigmatizing attitudes, while the one that provided stigmatizing interpretations and stigmatizing self-disclosures had the least beneficial effect. We also discovered side effects of chatbot's self-disclosure: notably, that chatbots were perceived to have inflexible and strong opinions, which undermined their credibility. As such, this paper contributes to knowledge about how chatbot designs shape users' perceptions of the chatbots themselves, and how chatbots' interpretation and self-disclosure may be leveraged to help reduce mental-illness stigma.