Human vs. AI counseling: College students' perspectives

Abstract

Transitioning to college life while navigating the complexities of emerging adulthood can be stressful. In some instances, it may even lead to the onset of mental health problems or the exacerbation of existing issues. While therapeutic resources are typically available in tertiary educational contexts, social stigma may lead to service underutilization. Additionally, high student-to-therapist ratios can create bottlenecks to access when such services are sought. Offering an adjunct to traditional campus counseling services, AI chatbots can potentially address such issues. Chatbots can provide flexible, accessible, anonymous, and cost-effective first-line support, improving access and extending traditional treatment methodologies. This study evaluates college students' perceptions (N = 224) of an AI chatbot (Pi) designed to emulate supportive and empathetic interactions characterized by active listening. Participants blindly assessed transcripts from active listening interactions between a client and Pi versus interactions between a client and a human counselor/therapist. The results indicate that participants could not distinguish between the human-human and human-AI counseling transcripts, answering correctly only 47.5% of the time. Moreover, participants gave higher quality ratings to the human-AI counseling transcripts than the human-human ones. These findings provide tentative support for the user-acceptability of relational AI chatbots during the counseling process's early phases (active listening and problem exploration).