For consumers from historically marginalized groups, an everyday service encounter can carry an extra concern: Will the person helping me judge me because of who I am?
New research published in the Journal of Marketing suggests that concern can influence whether consumers prefer dealing with a person or an AI-powered provider.
Dipayan Biswas
Dipayan Biswas, professor of marketing at the University of South Florida, and his coauthors found that consumers from historically marginalized groups were more likely to prefer algorithmic service providers when their social identity was made salient. Those providers included AI-enabled tellers, chatbots, robots and digital kiosks.
Across field studies and controlled experiments, researchers traced the shift to increased concern about identity-based social judgment from human service providers. The same pattern did not emerge among historically privileged consumers.
The findings point to a gap businesses may not recognize. In preliminary surveys, 73% of marginalized consumers reported concerns about identity-based social judgment in service settings, while 72% of managers surveyed were unaware of those concerns.
For companies, the research suggests that providing an algorithmic service option could give some customers a more comfortable way to interact, particularly in settings where businesses struggle to maintain diverse frontline workforces.
Authors: Yeseul Kim, University of Bath; Dipayan Biswas, University of South Florida; Courtney Szocs, Pennsylvania State University; Khalia Jenkins, American University.