Voicebot and Deception

With technological advancements, interacting with a voicebot has become increasingly more common. Attitudes that promote or prevent dishonesty in human-human interactions may not carry over into human-machine interactions. There is little evidence of how interaction with a voicebot might affect dishonest behavior. We test whether individuals are more or less likely to lie to a voicebot than to a human using an online experiment in which subjects perform a coin-toss task and report the coin-toss outcomes. We vary the reporting channels, i.e., reporting via text, reporting to a voicebot, reporting to a sophisticated vociebot (AIbot), reporting to a human. For all the voice interaction treatments, we design an homogeneous online platform to mimic the real-world setting of voicebot interactions that varies only the robotic voice and pre-recorded human voice. We also vary the gender of voice for each treatment, i.e., feminine and masculine voice. We compare the difference between reporting to a machine (text, voicebot, or AIbot) and reporting to a human with pre-recorded voice. We also compare reporting via text and reporting via voice. We also analysis the effect of voice gender and the effect of sophistication of voicebot.