Social Influence

AI-enabled products and services such as voice activated assistants (e.g., Amazon's Alexa, Google’s Home), medical robots, digital financial advisors and personalized recommendation systems, are popular among consumers and are fundamentally altering how consumers interact with products and brands. While AI offers numerous advantages to consumers including rapid, reliable, and convenient access to relevant information and services, there exist a potential dark side to AI with considerable threats to consumer well-being including diminished cognitive functioning, loss of autonomy and control, and exposure to biased information. Hence, there is a need for empirical research that explores how AI-consumer interactions can impact consumers, both positively and negatively.

Given the widespread adoption of AI across diverse domains, including the critically important areas such as medicine and financial planning, it is imperative to gain a deeper understanding of how these interactions influence consumer behaviour. This understanding holds significant implications for consumers, scholars, businesses, and public policymakers. For consumers, it enables more informed decision-making regarding their engagement with AI technologies. Scholars benefit from insights into general human behaviour in the digital realm. Businesses can make more strategic decisions regarding the integration of AI in consumer interactions, including considerations of the types of information and contexts in which AI is utilized. Lastly, public policymakers can better gauge the need for guidelines and regulations to safeguard consumer welfare.

We invite contributions from marketing, psychology, sociology, economics, management, information systems, and any field that is interested in AI and consumers. We encourage conceptual and empirical articles, a broad range of methods (e.g., experiments, longitudinal studies, field studies) and would like to explore topics such as, but not limited to:

• Voice vs text interactions
• Consumer wellbeing
• Effects of anthropomorphized AI
• Bias in AI interactions
• Generative AI

Social Influence accepts Original Research Articles, Brief Reports, Registered Reports, and Registered Proofs of Concept.

Priyali Rajagopal is a Professor of Marketing at the G. Brint Ryan College of Business at the University of North Texas in Dallas, USA. Her research focuses on consumer psychology and specifically on how marketing communications and tactics can impact consumers’ memories and decision making. She worked as a brand manager at Unilever prior to obtaining her doctorate from The Ohio State University.

Laura Pricer is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega, Ga. She earned her Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of North Texas in 2022. She is interested in how technology and AI innovations affect consumer behavior and wellbeing. Additionally, she also investigates how brand activities such as political activism effect consumer behaviour.

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