The DOI matches its Crossref record; 38 of the 39 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
"I Hear You, I Feel You": Encouraging Deep Self-disclosure through a Chatbot
Abstract
Chatbots have great potential to serve as a low-cost, effective tool to support people's self-disclosure. Prior work has shown that reciprocity occurs in human-machine dialog; however, whether reciprocity can be leveraged to promote and sustain deep self-disclosure over time has not been systematically studied. In this work, we design, implement and evaluate a chatbot that has self-disclosure features when it performs small talk with people. We ran a study with 47 participants and divided them into three groups to use different chatting styles of the chatbot for three weeks. We found that chatbot self-disclosure had a reciprocal effect on promoting deeper participant self-disclosure that lasted over the study period, in which the other chat styles without self-disclosure features failed to deliver. Chatbot self-disclosure also had a positive effect on improving participants' perceived intimacy and enjoyment over the study period. Finally, we reflect on the design implications of chatbots where deep self-disclosure is needed over time.
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In the citing paper
“Trust is an important aspect of relationship building and self-disclosure, both with machines and humans (Lee et al., 2020).”
From My Chatbot Companion - a Study of Human-Chatbot Relationships (2021) · cites this paper as Lee et al., 2020
In the citing paper
“Previous research has shown that a chatbot's level of reciprocity can influence users' willingness to self-disclose as well as the perceived level of intimacy and enjoyment (Lee et al., 2020).”
From My Chatbot Companion - a Study of Human-Chatbot Relationships (2021) · cites this paper as Lee et al., 2020
In the citing paper
“However, contrary findings have also been identified as some studies show evidence that people respond well and disclose more personal information if the chatbot is presented as a bot and can also display emotions [60,61].”
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“In contrast, emotion-aware CAs can gain users’ trust more quickly, helping to elicit accurate information and offering reassurance in high-stress situations [30, 31].”
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“Importantly, our study demonstrates that these interpersonal disclosure mechanisms also operate in-situ in human-chatbot conversations, beyond the scripted or laboratory settings of prior research [53].”
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“Chatbot-based systems, in particular, have shown promise in improving user engagement and adherence while encouraging self-disclosure [4], [5].”
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“Additionally, this finding contributes to the existing literature on chatbots’ self-disclosure [58, 70] by highlighting that not only is self-disclosure important, but the content of the experiences disclosed also plays a significant role.”
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“Some studies report benefits: a conversational agent’s self-disclosure and reciprocity enhanced user experience (S. Lee & Choi, 2017), and a self-disclosing chatbot encouraged users to share deeper thoughts and emotions over time (Y.-C. Lee et al., 2020).”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Lee, Y.-C., Yamashita, N., Huang, Y., & Fu, W.
- Affiliations
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
- NTT (Japan) (JP)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-04-21
- Pages
- 1-12
- OpenAlex
- W3029922759
- Cited by
- 339
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2026: 52 · 2025: 86 · 2024: 60 · 2023: 58 · 2022: 45 · 2021: 32 · 2020: 6
- FWCI
- 49.75
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Scientific Research (A) 17H00771)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › AI in Service Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Keywords
- chatbots, self-disclosure, reciprocity, human-computer dialogue, small talk, intimacy, enjoyment, chatbot design, long-term interaction
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