# Conversational technology and reactions to withheld information

## TL;DR

Conversational technologies like Alexa and Google Assistant lead people to react more critically when information is withheld compared to traditional digital formats.

## Contribution

The study shows that conversational modes of information delivery increase critical responses to withheld information compared to traditional media.

## Key findings

- Conversational modes reduce evaluations of products or services when information is withheld.
- Conversational modes increase the likelihood of recalling that information was withheld.
- Effects are consistent across different conversational formats and with the Google Assistant.

## Abstract

People frequently face decisions that require making inferences about withheld information. The advent of large language models coupled with conversational technology, e.g., Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and the Google Assistant, is changing the mode in which people make these inferences. We demonstrate that conversational modes of information provision, relative to traditional digital media, result in more critical responses to withheld information, including: (1) a reduction in evaluations of a product or service for which information is withheld and (2) an increased likelihood of recalling that information was withheld. These effects are robust across multiple conversational modes: a recorded phone conversation, an unfolding chat conversation, and a conversation script. We provide further evidence that these effects hold for conversations with the Google Assistant, a prominent conversational technology. The experimental results point to participants’ intuitions about why the information was withheld as the driver of the effect.