Understanding How Psychological Distance Influences User Preferences in Conversational Versus Web Search

2024-09-30

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how psychological distance—the user’s perceived proximity to a search task—shapes preference between conversational search and traditional web search. Employing a mixed-methods approach—including controlled experiments, surveys, semi-structured interviews, and thematic analysis—we find that greater psychological distance significantly increases preference for conversational search, accompanied by higher ratings in credibility, utility, enjoyment, and usability. This work is the first to systematically identify psychological distance as a key cognitive determinant of search paradigm preference. It introduces the “psychological distance alignment” perspective, uncovering three intrinsic drivers: explainability, anthropomorphism, and contextual fit. Based on these findings, we derive design principles for search systems tailored to varying psychological distance scenarios—advancing both theoretical understanding of human–AI interaction and practical guidelines for adaptive search interface design.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Psychology-informed user models and recommender systems
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social mining and social search on the Web

Abstract

Conversational search offers an easier and faster alternative to conventional web search, while having downsides like lack of source verification. Research has examined performance disparities between these two systems in different settings. However, little work has considered the effects of variations within a given search task. We hypothesize that psychological distance - one''s perceived closeness to a target event - affects information needs in search tasks, and investigate the corresponding effects on user preferences between web and conversational search systems. We find that with greater psychological distances, users perceive conversational search as more credible, useful, enjoyable, and easy to use, and demonstrate increased preference for this system. We reveal qualitative reasons for these differences and provide design implications for search system designers.

Problem

• Examines psychological distance impact on search preferences.
• Compares user preferences between conversational and web search.
• Investigates credibility and usability differences in search systems.

Innovation

• Investigates psychological distance impact on search preferences
• Compares user preferences between conversational and web search
• Provides design implications for search system optimization