Social Scripts and Expectancy Violations: Evaluating Communication with Human or AI Chatbot Interactants

ABSTRACT As artificial intelligence (AI) agents like chatbots play larger roles in daily life, questions arise regarding how people evaluate their communication. Perspectives applying communication scripts to human-AI interactions propose that outcomes are determined by messages and the embedded cues therein. The expectancy violations perspective posits that message characteristics are less important than whether they are expected or unexpected. A pilot study established baseline expectancies about humans’ and chatbots’ conversational contingency and response latencies. A 2 (contingency: more/less contingent responses) × 2 (latency: fast/slow responses) × 2 (communicator identity: human/chatbot) experiment then tested predictions derived from human-human communication scripts and expectancy violations using textual variations in an e-commerce chat. Communicators showing greater conversational contingency and faster responses were most credible, whether they were human or chatbots, but chatbots were consistently less socially attractive than humans. Results show that humans and chatbots are evaluated similarly regarding the functional, but not the relational aspects of communication. There was greater support for the communication script perspective than the expectancy violations perspective regarding interactions with chatbots.