Wieland Britt, de Wit Jan, de Rooij Alwin
Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands.
St. Joost School of Art and Design, Avans University of Applied Sciences, Breda, Netherlands.
Front Artif Intell. 2022 Sep 23;5:880673. doi: 10.3389/frai.2022.880673. eCollection 2022.
Brainstorming is a creative technique that fosters collaboration to enhance idea generation. The occurrence of evaluation apprehension, a fear of being evaluated negatively by others, however, can stymy brainstorming. How the advantages of collaboration can be leveraged while evaluation apprehension is prevented is an open scientific and practical problem. In this brief research report, it is proposed that chatbots could provide a solution. Chatbots can be designed to share ideas with their users, facilitating inspiration. Compared to human beings, chatbots are also perceived as possessing limited agency and evaluative capacity. This could reduce evaluation apprehension. Given that chatbots are often embedded in a textual chat interface, social cues (picture, name, and description) can reinforce the perceived chatbot identity, enhancing its alleged effects on evaluation apprehension and subsequently on brainstorming performance. These conjectures were tested in an online 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment ( = 120) where people were instructed to brainstorm with a partner that was framed as either a chatbot or human being (but followed the same automated script), with or without the presence of social cues. The results showed that brainstorming with a chatbot led participants to produce more ideas, with more diversity than brainstorming with an alleged human being. Social cues enhanced the effect on idea diversity, but only with the chatbot. No significant effects on evaluation apprehension were found. The contribution of this study is therefore that chatbots can be used for effective human-machine teaming during brainstorming, but this enhancement is not explained by its effects on evaluation apprehension.
头脑风暴是一种促进合作以增强创意生成的创新技术。然而，评估焦虑（即害怕被他人负面评价）的出现可能会阻碍头脑风暴。如何在防止评估焦虑的同时利用合作的优势是一个开放的科学和实际问题。在这份简短的研究报告中，有人提出聊天机器人可以提供一个解决方案。聊天机器人可以被设计成与用户分享想法，促进灵感激发。与人类相比，聊天机器人也被认为具有有限的能动性和评估能力。这可以减少评估焦虑。鉴于聊天机器人通常嵌入在文本聊天界面中，社交线索（图片、名字和描述）可以强化所感知到的聊天机器人身份，增强其对评估焦虑以及随后对头脑风暴表现的所谓影响。这些推测在一项在线的2×2被试间实验（N = 120）中得到了检验，在该实验中，人们被指示与一个被设定为聊天机器人或人类（但遵循相同的自动脚本）的伙伴进行头脑风暴，有无社交线索的存在。结果表明，与聊天机器人进行头脑风暴会使参与者产生更多的想法，且比与所谓的人类进行头脑风暴具有更多样性。社交线索增强了对想法多样性的影响，但仅在与聊天机器人的情况下。未发现对评估焦虑有显著影响。因此，本研究的贡献在于，聊天机器人可用于在头脑风暴期间进行有效的人机协作，但这种增强效果并非由其对评估焦虑的影响所解释。
