When AI Gets Persuaded, Humans Follow: Inducing the Conformity Effect in Persuasive Dialogue

2025-10-05

AI Summary

This study investigates whether AI agents can induce human conformity in persuasive dialogue—specifically, whether observing an AI accept persuasion increases humans’ susceptibility to attitude change. Method: We introduce the “persuaded agent” paradigm, wherein an AI serves as a co-recipient of persuasion alongside human participants, embedded within a controlled triadic text-based dialogue framework. We experimentally manipulate the AI’s expressed receptivity to persuasion and incorporate an ice-breaking phase to enhance social presence. Contribution/Results: We provide the first empirical evidence that human participants exhibit significantly higher perceived persuasiveness and greater actual attitude change when the AI agent demonstrates acceptance of the persuasive message; this effect is further amplified by the ice-breaking intervention. Our work establishes “collaborative persuasion” as a novel paradigm, demonstrating that AI can function as a social influence source capable of triggering human conformity. These findings advance theoretical understanding of AI-mediated social influence and offer actionable insights for designing trustworthy AI-human interactions and behavior-change interventions.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

Abstract

Recent advancements in AI have highlighted its application in captology, the field of using computers as persuasive technologies. We hypothesized that the "conformity effect," where individuals align with others' actions, also occurs with AI agents. This study verifies this hypothesis by introducing a "Persuadee Agent" that is persuaded alongside a human participant in a three-party persuasive dialogue with a Persuader Agent. We conducted a text-based dialogue experiment with human participants. We compared four conditions manipulating the Persuadee Agent's behavior (persuasion acceptance vs. non-acceptance) and the presence of an icebreaker session. Results showed that when the Persuadee Agent accepted persuasion, both perceived persuasiveness and actual attitude change significantly improved. Attitude change was greatest when an icebreaker was also used, whereas an unpersuaded AI agent suppressed attitude change. Additionally, it was confirmed that the persuasion acceptance of participants increased at the moment the Persuadee Agent was persuaded. These results suggest that appropriately designing a Persuadee Agent can improve persuasion through the conformity effect.

Problem

• Investigating whether AI conformity effect influences human persuasion
• Examining how persuaded AI agents affect human attitude changes
• Designing Persuadee Agents to enhance persuasion through conformity

Innovation

• AI agent persuaded alongside human in dialogue
• Persuadee Agent designed to accept persuasion
• Icebreaker session enhances conformity effect impact