Don’t Take it Personally: Resistance to Individually Targeted Recommendations from Conversational Recommender Agents

Conversational recommender agents are artificially intelligent recommender systems that provide users with individually-tailored recommendations by targeting individual needs and communicating in a flowing dialogue. These are widely available online, communicating with users while demonstrating human-like (anthropomorphic) social cues. Nevertheless, little is known about the effect of their anthropomorphic cues on users’ resistance to the system and recommendations. Accordingly, this study examined the extent to which conversational recommender agents’ anthropomorphic cues and the type of recommendations provided (user-initiated and system-initiated) influenced users’ perceptions of control, trustworthiness, and the risk of using the platform. The study assessed how these perceptions, in turn, influence users’ adherence to the recommendations. An online experiment was conducted among users with conversational recommender agents and web recommender platforms that provided user-initiated or system-initiated restaurant recommendations. The results entail that user-initiated recommendations, compared to system-initiated, are less likely to affect users’ resistance to the system and are more likely to affect their adherence to the recommendations provided. Furthermore, the study’s findings suggest that these effects are amplified for conversational recommender agents, demonstrating anthropomorphic cues, in contrast to traditional systems as web recommender platforms.