Reluctant to Ask a Human-ish Chatbot? When Anthropomorphic Cues Help and When They Backfire

How do students, especially marketing students, with their diverse cultural values and expectations about authority, respond when technological tools such as chatbot assistants attempt to mimic a human instructor? Across two experimental studies, we examine how the effects of human-likeness in chatbot assistants (anthropomorphization) depend on students’ values. Challenging the assumption that adding humanlike features to AI is inherently desirable, results from Study 1 find that the presence of humanlike cues in chatbot assistants does not universally enhance perceptions of human-likeness. Instead, students high in power distance orientation i.e. those who are more accepting of hierarchical relationships, perceive anthropomorphic chatbots as less human-like than non-anthropomorphic chatbots. This backfiring effect was more pronounced among marketing students compared to non-marketing students. Study 2 builds on these findings by analyzing real-time student interactions with a custom-built chatbot. While perceived human-likeness increases engagement and subsequently improves attitudes toward use, students with high conformity to authority ask significantly fewer questions when the chatbot appears highly humanlike. These findings reveal a novel cultural boundary condition for effective student interactions with humanlike technology: when students value deference to authority, humanlike bots may inhibit rather than enhance student engagement with chatbots.