Abstract
A particularly persuasive (charismatic) tone of voice has a far reaching influence on people’s opinions and actions. However, does this also apply if the charismatic tone of voice is produced by a computer, and if this computer asks people to act against better knowledge? Addressing these questions, an experiment was set up in which 30 locals of Sonderborg/DK were asked to conduct a test drive with a car from the marina to the university campus of the city. The test drive was conducted on the pretext of assessing a newly developed retrofit car navigation system that provides voice instructions only. The locals did not know that the system was only a remote-controlled mock-up that, moreover, started giving its driver wrong instructions after about half of the trip. The instructions got successively falser, until the only option to get to the university campus was to make a complete U-turn. We measured the point at which the drivers aborted the test drive in two conditions. In the first one, the system spoke with the more charismatic tone of voice of Steve Jobs. In the second one, it spoke with the less charismatic tone of voice of Mark Zuckerberg. Results show that drivers followed the navigation system’s increasingly worsening instructions significantly longer in the Steve Jobs condition, and that the system received higher quality, trustworthiness, and purchase ratings if it spoke with Steve Jobs’ tone of voice. Results are discussed in terms of persuasive technology and implications for charisma/leadership analyses and training.
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Niebuhr, O., Michalsky, J. (2019). Computer-Generated Speaker Charisma and Its Effects on Human Actions in a Car-Navigation System Experiment - or How Steve Jobs’ Tone of Voice Can Take You Anywhere. In: Misra, S., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2019. ICCSA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11620. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24296-1_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24296-1_31
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