Research Summary
Research Summary
Interpersonal Communication & Human-Computer Interaction
Description
This stream of research, combining methods from experimental psychology and natural language processing, investigates behaviors that improve interpersonal communication. In our paper on question-asking published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we identify a robust and consistent relationship between question-asking and liking: people who ask more questions are better liked by their conversation partners. Furthermore, we find the same effect in human-chatbot interactions in a publicly posted Facebook dataset. A follow-up project investigates the gendering of question-asking chatbots, looking at whether the use of question-asking personal assistants helps to perpetuate gender stereotypes.