Perceptions of Anthropomorphism in a Chatbot Dialogue: The Role of Animacy and Intelligence

When interacting with embodied agents, users often rely on a variety of cues from the agent’s embodiment to form perceptions of animacy and intelligence, including its appearance and behaviour. Due to chatbots’ disembodiment, users’ perceptions of a chatbot’s animacy and intelligence are mostly dependent on the textual properties of the dialogue. The current study aims to investigate the mediating role of perceptions of chatbot’s intelligence and animacy on users’ perceptions of the chatbot’s anthropomorphism. An online experiment was conducted with a chatbot and a web platform. Both systems asked users three basic questions for providing a restaurant recommendation. By communicating the same content via different modalities of communication (i.e., flowing dialogue and traditional web interface); this study compares the differences in these perceptions between chatbots to traditional web platforms. The results of a mediation analysis entail that the chatbot was perceived as more animate than the web platform, and accordingly, it was perceived as more anthropomorphic than the web platform as users’ perceptions of animacy fully mediated this effect. Also, there is no evidence for differences in users’ perceptions of intelligence between the chatbot and the web platform.