IdeaBot: Investigating Social Facilitation in Human-Machine Team Creativity

The present study investigates how human subjects collaborate with a computer-mediated chatbot in creative idea generation tasks. In three text-based between-group studies, we tested whether the perceived identity (i.e., whether a partner was believed to be a bot or as a human) or conversational style (human or robotic) of a teammate would moderate the outcomes of participants’ creative production. In Study 1, participants worked with either a chatbot or a human confederate. In Study 2, all participants worked with a human teammate but were informed that their partner was either a human or a chatbot. Conversely, all participants worked with a chatbot in Study 3, but their partner was described as either a chatbot or a human. We investigated differences in idea generation outcomes and found that participants consistently contributed more ideas and ideas of higher quality when they perceived their teamworking partner to be a bot. Furthermore, when the conversational style of the partner was robotic, participants with high anxiety in group communication reported greater creative self-efficacy in task performance. Finally, whether the perceived dominance of a partner and the pressure to come up with ideas during the task mediated positive outcomes of idea generation depended on whether the conversational style of the bot partner was robot- or human-like. Based on our findings, we discussed implications for future design of artificial agents as active team players in collaboration tasks.