Chatbots are a burgeoning opportunity for news media outlets to disseminate their content in a conversational way, and create an engaging experience around it. Since chatbots are social and interactive technologies, they might be effective tools to lower the threshold of engaging with news content containing opposing views. In an experiment, we test this idea by investigating whether people are more likely to accept a news article containing conflicting views when it is delivered by a chatbot, as compared with the same article on a news website. The results indicated that people agreed more to a counter-attitudinal news article when it was delivered by a news chatbot (compared with the website article). In addition, users also perceived this chatbot article as more credible. The underlying process for this effect was that people attributed human-like characteristics to the chatbot on an implicit level (i.e., perceived mindless anthropomorphism). These results are discussed in the light of their potential contribution to an informed public discourse and a decrease in polarization in our society.

中文翻译：

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克服聊天机器人新闻的两极分化？调查新闻内容的影响，其中包含对协议和信誉的反对意见

聊天机器人为新闻媒体提供了一个新兴的机会，可以以对话的方式传播其内容，并围绕它创造一种引人入胜的体验。由于聊天机器人是社交和交互式技术，因此它们可能是降低与包含相反观点的新闻内容进行互动的门槛的有效工具。在实验中，我们通过调查与聊天网站上的同一篇文章相比，人们是否更愿意接受包含聊天视图的新闻文章，从而检验了这一想法。结果表明，当新闻聊天机器人发布反竞争新闻文章（与网站文章相比）时，人们更加赞同。此外，用户还认为此聊天机器人文章更可信。这种影响的潜在过程是人们在隐性层面上将类似于人的特征归因于聊天机器人（即感知到的无意识的拟人化）。我们将根据这些结果对知情的公众话语的潜在贡献以及我们社会两极分化的减少来讨论这些结果。