We received funding of £14,000 from the LSE Research Impact and Support Fund for the project “Field experiments of social influence and contagion with AI-assisted bots.” The project will study social influence and contagion from autonomous artificial agents onto human users in realistic online settings. We will conduct field experiments in three different online communities to causally test the hypothesis that AI is less influential than humans if it claims emotional intelligence but more effective if it relies on logical reasoning and argumentation.

LSE made the announcement here.