Conversational technology and reactions to withheld information

Abstract

People frequently face decisions that require making inferences about withheld information. The advent of large language models coupled with conversational technology, e.g., Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and the Google Assistant, is changing the mode in which people make these inferences. We demonstrate that conversational modes of information provision, relative to traditional digital media, result in more critical responses to withheld information, including: (1) a reduction in evaluations of a product or service for which information is withheld and (2) an increased likelihood of recalling that information was withheld. These effects are robust across multiple conversational modes: a recorded phone conversation, an unfolding chat conversation, and a conversation script. We provide further evidence that these effects hold for conversations with the Google Assistant, a prominent conversational technology. The experimental results point to participants’ intuitions about why the information was withheld as the driver of the effect.