Dialoging Resonance: How Users Perceive, Reciprocate and React to Chatbot's Self-Disclosure in Conversational Recommendations

Using chatbots to deliver recommendations is increasingly popular. The design of recommendation chatbots has primarily been taking an information-centric approach by focusing on the recommended content per se. Limited attention is on how social connection and relational strategies, such as self-disclosure from a chatbot, may influence users' perception and acceptance of the recommendation. In this work, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a social chatbot capable of performing three different levels of self-disclosure: factual information (low), cognitive opinions (medium), and emotions (high). In the evaluation, we recruited 372 participants to converse with the chatbot on two topics: movies and COVID-19 experiences. In each topic, the chatbot performed small talks and made recommendations relevant to the topic. Participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions where the chatbot used factual, cognitive, emotional, and adaptive strategies to perform self-disclosures. By training a text classifier to identify users' level of self-disclosure in real-time, the adaptive chatbot can dynamically match its self-disclosure to the level of disclosure exhibited by the users. Our results show that users reciprocate with higher-level self-disclosure when a recommendation chatbot consistently displays emotions throughout the conversation. Chatbot's emotional disclosure also led to increased interactional enjoyment and more positive interpersonal perception towards the bot, fostering a stronger human-chatbot relationship and thus leading to increased recommendation effectiveness, including a higher tendency to accept the recommendation. We discuss the understandings obtained and implications to future design.