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[2602.17850] Mind the Style: Impact of Communication Style on Human-Chatbot Interaction
Summary
This article examines how different communication styles of chatbots affect user experience and task success, revealing insights from a user study on chatbot interactions.
Why It Matters
Understanding the impact of communication style on human-chatbot interactions is crucial for enhancing user satisfaction and task performance. This research highlights the need for personalized conversational agents that cater to user preferences, particularly in diverse user demographics.
Key Takeaways
- Friendly communication styles in chatbots increase user satisfaction.
- Task completion rates improve significantly for female users with friendly chatbots.
- Limited evidence of users mimicking chatbot styles suggests a need for better design in conversational agents.
Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction arXiv:2602.17850 (cs) [Submitted on 19 Feb 2026] Title:Mind the Style: Impact of Communication Style on Human-Chatbot Interaction Authors:Erik Derner, Dalibor Kučera, Aditya Gulati, Ayoub Bagheri, Nuria Oliver View a PDF of the paper titled Mind the Style: Impact of Communication Style on Human-Chatbot Interaction, by Erik Derner and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Conversational agents increasingly mediate everyday digital interactions, yet the effects of their communication style on user experience and task success remain unclear. Addressing this gap, we describe the results of a between-subject user study where participants interact with one of two versions of a chatbot called NAVI which assists users in an interactive map-based 2D navigation task. The two chatbot versions differ only in communication style: one is friendly and supportive, while the other is direct and task-focused. Our results show that the friendly style increases subjective satisfaction and significantly improves task completion rates among female participants only, while no baseline differences between female and male participants were observed in a control condition without the chatbot. Furthermore, we find little evidence of users mimicking the chatbot's style, suggesting limited linguistic accommodation. These findings highlight the importance of user- and task-sensitive conversational agents and support that communication style ...