I’m standing in the pouring rain trying to retrieve a parcel from a locker wall that just won’t open. I call the help desk and am greeted by Matt, a customer service chatbot. To get my parcel, I must follow his instructions, describing the problem and speaking in full sentences. But it’s not working, so I ask for a human. Matt asks for my phone number. I give it to him. He says ‘Thank you’ and asks how he can help, again. Minutes pass. The rain is unrelenting, as is the bot’s cheeriness. When the locker finally clicks open, I hang up while he’s still speaking.
A week later, I find myself still thinking about that exchange – about my irritation, and about hanging up on him like that. My discomfort about how I treated the bot might not be unusual. In 2003, the media researchers Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass documented what they called the ‘media equation’: people apply genuine social reflexes to computers automatically, even when we know they aren’t conscious. Some of us say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ to chatbots or feel sorry for robot vacuum cleaners. The researchers’ explanation is not that we’re naive, exactly. Our brains process a voice – any voice – as a social presence, triggering social responses before conscious thought has had a chance to intervene.
But this social reflex isn’t always kind. When people talk to chatbots, we often seem to strip basic courtesy out of the exchange. Our messages become shorter, simpler and more profane, and in one analysis, more than half of conversations included at least one form of insult or verbal aggression.
Chatbots are increasingly woven into daily life, which means that many of us are likely having these automatic – and frequently brusque – social responses multiple times a day. They are becoming habitual. Habits take root, after all, when a behaviour is repeated in stable contexts and driven by consistent cues. You can see this with other ways of using technology: if you pick up your phone to check a message, only to lose yourself for 10 minutes as you scroll your favourite apps, you probably didn’t deliberate about whether to use those apps; you just did it, because that’s what you usually do when you look at your phone. You’ve developed a habit.
Chatbot interactions are, for habit formation, close to ideal. When you have a question and open an AI-based chatbot app, there is little friction or waiting. Often the reward is nearly instantaneous. The register that many of us use when we get there – direct, brief, transactional – is already familiar from voice assistants: instructing Siri to set a timer, commanding ‘Alexa, stop!’ when the smart speaker gets it wrong. The little chatbot prompt box invites the same: cut the fluff and demand what you need. It seems to get results, too. Some studies on prompt tone suggest the systems themselves often respond better to it.
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