Mind the Style: Impact of Communication Style on Human-Chatbot Interaction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Derner, Erik, Kučera, Dalibor, Gulati, Aditya, Bagheri, Ayoub, Oliver, Nuria
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Derner, Erik
Kučera, Dalibor
Gulati, Aditya
Bagheri, Ayoub
Oliver, Nuria
author_facet Derner, Erik
Kučera, Dalibor
Gulati, Aditya
Bagheri, Ayoub
Oliver, Nuria
contents Conversational agents increasingly mediate everyday digital interactions, yet the effects of their communication style on user experience and task success remain unclear. Addressing this gap, we describe the results of a between-subject user study where participants interact with one of two versions of a chatbot called NAVI which assists users in an interactive map-based 2D navigation task. The two chatbot versions differ only in communication style: one is friendly and supportive, while the other is direct and task-focused. Our results show that the friendly style increases subjective satisfaction and significantly improves task completion rates among female participants only, while no baseline differences between female and male participants were observed in a control condition without the chatbot. Furthermore, we find little evidence of users mimicking the chatbot's style, suggesting limited linguistic accommodation. These findings highlight the importance of user- and task-sensitive conversational agents and support that communication style personalization can meaningfully enhance interaction quality and performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_17850
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mind the Style: Impact of Communication Style on Human-Chatbot Interaction
Derner, Erik
Kučera, Dalibor
Gulati, Aditya
Bagheri, Ayoub
Oliver, Nuria
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Conversational agents increasingly mediate everyday digital interactions, yet the effects of their communication style on user experience and task success remain unclear. Addressing this gap, we describe the results of a between-subject user study where participants interact with one of two versions of a chatbot called NAVI which assists users in an interactive map-based 2D navigation task. The two chatbot versions differ only in communication style: one is friendly and supportive, while the other is direct and task-focused. Our results show that the friendly style increases subjective satisfaction and significantly improves task completion rates among female participants only, while no baseline differences between female and male participants were observed in a control condition without the chatbot. Furthermore, we find little evidence of users mimicking the chatbot's style, suggesting limited linguistic accommodation. These findings highlight the importance of user- and task-sensitive conversational agents and support that communication style personalization can meaningfully enhance interaction quality and performance.
title Mind the Style: Impact of Communication Style on Human-Chatbot Interaction
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17850