Chatbot Personas & Credibility

Abstract

The rise of LLMs has ushered in a wave of conversational search engines. These interfaces allow people to engage in dialogues with LLM-infused chatbots to seek information. However, as people tend to infer personalities from digital social interactions, and given that personalities have been shown to affect credibility, these perceptions of chatbot design may affect assessments of information credibility. In this study, we conducted a controlled online study with 190 participants. We found that in conversational search, perceived conscientiousness and agreeableness of a chatbot can increase credibility, while perceived extraversion and neuroticism can decrease the credibility of the search results. This research contributes to our understanding of how conversational interfaces and their personality and persona designs can impact credibility. We also provide design implications for conversational search interfaces based on our findings.

Sample conversational exchanges