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

2026-01-28

AI Summary

This study investigates how feedback styles in conversational agents for behavioral interventions balance users’ psychological reactance against engagement and surprise. Drawing on experimental psychology and human-computer interaction methodologies, the research employs a mixed-methods design to compare three feedback styles: “direct,” “polite,” and a novel “verbal leakage” approach. Findings indicate that while the polite style effectively mitigates psychological reactance, it lacks sufficient appeal to sustain engagement. In contrast, verbal leakage—though slightly increasing reactance—significantly enhances perceived surprise, humor, and user involvement. These results illuminate a critical trade-off in feedback design and offer a novel, effective interaction strategy for dialogue systems aimed at promoting behavior change.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search

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.

Problem

• psychological reactance
• engagement
• chatbot feedback
• behavior change
• user perception

Innovation

• Verbal Leakage
• psychological reactance
• chatbot feedback
• engagement
• behavior change intervention