Polite But Boring? Trade-offs Between Engagement and Psychological Reactance to Chatbot Feedback Styles

Abstract

As conversational agents become increasingly common in behaviour change interventions, understanding optimal feedback delivery mechanisms becomes increasingly important. However, choosing a style that both lessens psychological reactance (perceived threats to freedom) while simultaneously eliciting feelings of surprise and engagement represents a complex design problem. We explored how three different feedback styles: 'Direct', 'Politeness', and 'Verbal Leakage' (slips or disfluencies to reveal a desired behaviour) affect user perceptions and behavioural intentions. Matching expectations from literature, the 'Direct' chatbot led to lower behavioural intentions and higher reactance, while the 'Politeness' chatbot evoked higher behavioural intentions and lower reactance. However, 'Politeness' was also seen as unsurprising and unengaging by participants. In contrast, 'Verbal Leakage' evoked reactance, yet also elicited higher feelings of surprise, engagement, and humour. These findings highlight that effective feedback requires navigating trade-offs between user reactance and engagement, with novel approaches such as 'Verbal Leakage' offering promising alternative design opportunities.

To appear at ACM CHI 2026. 21 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables

References in corpus (12)

• How should my chatbot interact? A survey on human-chatbot interaction design
• What Makes a Good Conversation? Challenges in Designing Truly Conversational Agents
• Conceptual Metaphors Impact Perceptions of Human-AI Collaboration
• Effects of Persuasive Dialogues: Testing Bot Identities and Inquiry Strategies
• Designing Effective Interview Chatbots: Automatic Chatbot Profiling and Design Suggestion Generation for Chatbot Debugging
• SwitchTube: A Proof-of-Concept System Introducing "Adaptable Commitment Interfaces" as a Tool for Digital Wellbeing
• Customizing Emotional Support: How Do Individuals Construct and Interact With LLM-Powered Chatbots
• Directed Diversity: Leveraging Language Embedding Distances for Collective Creativity in Crowd Ideation
• "I've talked to ChatGPT about my issues last night.": Examining Mental Health Conversations with Large Language Models through Reddit Analysis
• Scrolling in the Deep: Analysing Contextual Influences on Intervention Effectiveness during Infinite Scrolling on Social Media
• Comparing How a Chatbot References User Utterances from Previous Chatting Sessions: An Investigation of Users' Privacy Concerns and Perceptions
• GPT Assisted Annotation of Rhetorical and Linguistic Features for Interpretable Propaganda Technique Detection in News Text