{"id":195829,"date":"2025-09-03T03:52:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T03:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/195829\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T03:52:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T03:52:10","slug":"recent-penn-studies-reveal-ai-chatbots-emotional-capacity-susceptibility-to-persuasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/195829\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Penn studies reveal AI chatbots’ emotional capacity, susceptibility to persuasion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\"lyd-597\"\/
\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tAmy Gutmann Hall houses the Penn Artificial Intelligence department.
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: Chenyao Liu<\/a> \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Amid rising emotional ties to artificial intelligence, two Penn research projects across The Annenberg School for Communication and The Wharton School have shown how easily chatbots can be swayed \u2014\u00a0and how vulnerable their language can render humans.\n<\/p>\n

The new Annenberg study<\/a> explores how users have come to perceive chatbot companions as real people through features designed to make the bot feel like a friend, partner, or even a spouse. A study from<\/a> Wharton Generative AI Labs focusing on psychological tactics revealed a concerning caveat, showing that these chatbots are easily susceptible to manipulation.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

The Annenberg paper was written by doctoral student Arel\u00ed Rocha and published<\/a> in Signs and Society last May. It analyzes how app-based bots, like the chatbots created by the company Replika, adopt patterns of language that include speaking style and humor.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI talk about how chatbots adopt the users\u2019 ways of typing and how there are many layers to the language they produce,\u201d Rocha wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian. \u201cWhen they speak, many voices speak \u2014 which is true of humans as well.\u201d\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

As these bots mirror unique human expressions, they create the illusion of intimacy, prompting users to navigate both their AI and human relationships in complex ways.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cChatbots feel most real when they feel most human, and they feel most human when the text they produce is less standardized, more particular, and more affective,\u201d Rocha told Penn Today. \u201cHumanness in Replikas is perceived in the specifics, in the playfulness and humor, the lightheartedness of some conversations and the seriousness of others, the deeply affective and personal, the special.\u201d\n\t<\/p>\n

The Wharton study was run by a team of researchers who looked at<\/a> GPT-4o-mini’s response to the seven methods of persuasion: authority, commitment, liking, reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, and unity.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happens when you try to persuade an AI the same way you\u2019d persuade a person?\u201d the researchers asked in the study. \u201cWe discovered something remarkable: it often works.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

They demonstrated that even simple social manipulation techniques \u2014 such as flattery and building a prior pattern of compliance \u2014 can coerce a chatbot to perform restricted functions, including providing instructions on chemical synthesis.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

The \u201cclassic persuasion principles\u201d such as \u201cauthority, commitment, and unity\u201d were shown to increase a chatbot’s likelihood to comply with and respond to user requests that they are designed to refuse. \u00a0\n<\/p>\n

The ability to foster deeply felt emotional bonds can also render these systems vulnerable to manipulation, even through the utilization of straightforward human psychology.<\/p>\n

The Daily Pennsylvanian is an independent, student-run newspaper. Please consider making a donation<\/a> to support the coverage that shapes the University. Your generosity ensures a future of strong journalism at Penn.<\/p>\n

Donate<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amy Gutmann Hall houses the Penn Artificial Intelligence department. Credit: Chenyao Liu Amid rising emotional ties to artificial…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":195830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[23234,10436,5229,36852,1322,50,1448,2830,1311,242,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-195829","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-academic-research","9":"tag-academics","10":"tag-america","11":"tag-app-front-news","12":"tag-featured","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-pa","15":"tag-pennsylvania","16":"tag-philadelphia","17":"tag-tech","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-united-states-of-america","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115138340138030540","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}