The Influence of Anthropomorphic Cues on Patients’ Perceived Anthropomorphism, Social Presence, Trust Building, and Acceptance of Health Care Conversational Agents: Within-Subject Web-Based Experiment

Background The last decade has witnessed the rapid development of health care conversational agents (CAs); however, there are still great challenges in making health care CAs trustworthy and acceptable to patients. Objective Focusing on intelligent guidance CAs, a type of health care CA for web-based patient triage, this study aims to investigate how anthropomorphic cues influence patients’ perceived anthropomorphism and social presence of such CAs and evaluate how these perceptions facilitate their trust-building process and acceptance behavior. Methods To test the research hypotheses, the video vignette methodology was used to evaluate patients’ perceptions and acceptance of various intelligent guidance CAs. The anthropomorphic cues of CAs were manipulated in a 3×2 within-subject factorial experiment with 103 participants, with the factors of agent appearance (high, medium, and low anthropomorphic levels) and verbal cues (humanlike and machine-like verbal cues) as the within-subject variables. Results The 2-way repeated measures ANOVA analysis indicated that the higher anthropomorphic level of agent appearance significantly increased mindful anthropomorphism (high level>medium level: 4.57 vs 4.27; P=.01; high level>low level: 4.57 vs 4.04; P<.001; medium level>low level: 4.27 vs 4.04; P=.04), mindless anthropomorphism (high level>medium level: 5.39 vs 5.01; P<.001; high level>low level: 5.39 vs 4.85; P<.001), and social presence (high level>medium level: 5.19 vs 4.83; P<.001; high level>low level: 5.19 vs 4.72; P<.001), and the higher anthropomorphic level of verbal cues significantly increased mindful anthropomorphism (4.83 vs 3.76; P<.001), mindless anthropomorphism (5.60 vs 4.57; P<.001), and social presence (5.41 vs 4.41; P<.001). Meanwhile, a significant interaction between agent appearance and verbal cues (.004) was revealed. Second, the partial least squares results indicated that privacy concerns were negatively influenced by social presence (β=−.375; t312=4.494) and mindful anthropomorphism (β=−.112; t312=1.970). Privacy concerns (β=−.273; t312=9.558), social presence (β=.265; t312=4.314), and mindless anthropomorphism (β=.405; t312=7.145) predicted the trust in CAs, which further promoted the intention to disclose information (β=.675; t312=21.163), the intention to continuously use CAs (β=.190; t312=4.874), and satisfaction (β=.818; t312=46.783). Conclusions The findings show that a high anthropomorphic level of agent appearance and verbal cues could improve the perceptions of mindful anthropomorphism and mindless anthropomorphism as well as social presence. Furthermore, mindless anthropomorphism and social presence significantly promoted patients’ trust in CAs, and mindful anthropomorphism and social presence decreased privacy concerns. It is also worth noting that trust was an important antecedent and determinant of patients’ acceptance of CAs, including their satisfaction, intention to disclose information, and intention to continuously use CAs.