Artificial intelligence can persuade people to take political actions

2026-04-10

AI Summary

This study investigates whether conversational AI can effectively motivate individuals to engage in consequential political behaviors—such as signing petitions or donating—beyond merely shifting attitudes. Through two large-scale, preregistered experiments (N = 14,779), the authors systematically compare the efficacy of eight behavioral persuasion strategies against the best-performing attitudinal strategy. Results demonstrate that AI interventions significantly increase participation in political actions, with petition-signing rates rising by 19.7 percentage points. All behavioral strategies outperformed the attitudinal approach, though differences among them were modest. Crucially, attitude change showed no significant association with behavioral change, challenging the conventional paradigm of using attitudes as a proxy for real-world action. This work provides the first causal evidence that AI can influence authentic political behavior.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Voting
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Uses of LLMs and GenAI for marketplace design, bidding, and strategic interactions

Abstract

There is substantial concern about the ability of advanced artificial intelligence to influence people's behaviour. A rapidly growing body of research has found that AI can produce large persuasive effects on people's attitudes, but whether AI can persuade people to take consequential real-world actions has remained unclear. In two large preregistered experiments N=17,950 responses from 14,779 people), we used conversational AI models to persuade participants on a range of attitudinal and behavioural outcomes, including signing real petitions and donating money to charity. We found sizable AI persuasion effects on these behavioural outcomes (e.g. +19.7 percentage points on petition signing). However, we observed no evidence of a correlation between AI persuasion effects on attitudes and behaviour. Moreover, we replicated prior findings that information provision drove effects on attitudes, but found no such evidence for our behavioural outcomes. In a test of eight behavioural persuasion strategies, all outperformed the most effective attitudinal persuasion strategy, but differences among the eight were small. Taken together, these results suggest that previous findings relying on attitudinal outcomes may generalize poorly to behaviour, and therefore risk substantially mischaracterizing the real-world behavioural impact of AI persuasion.

Problem

• AI persuasion
• behavioral outcomes
• attitudinal change
• real-world actions
• artificial intelligence

Innovation

• AI persuasion
• behavioral outcomes
• attitudinal change
• conversational AI
• preregistered experiments