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"I Hear You, I Feel You": Encouraging Deep Self-disclosure through a Chatbot

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Chatbots have great potential to serve as a low-cost, effective tool to support people's self-disclosure. Prior work has shown that reciprocity occurs in human-machine dialog; however, whether reciprocity can be leveraged to promote and sustain deep self-disclosure over time has not been systematically studied. In this work, we design, implement and evaluate a chatbot that has self-disclosure features when it performs small talk with people. We ran a study with 47 participants and divided them into three groups to use different chatting styles of the chatbot for three weeks. We found that chatbot self-disclosure had a reciprocal effect on promoting deeper participant self-disclosure that lasted over the study period, in which the other chat styles without self-disclosure features failed to deliver. Chatbot self-disclosure also had a positive effect on improving participants' perceived intimacy and enjoyment over the study period. Finally, we reflect on the design implications of chatbots where deep self-disclosure is needed over time.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
10688 pages
ISBN:9781450367080
DOI:10.1145/3313831
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 23 April 2020

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  1. chatbot
  2. conversation
  3. self-disclosure, mental well-being

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