Persona and Persuasive Framing in AI Voice Agents: A $2\times2$ Field Experiment with Children
Abstract
Conversational agents increasingly interact with children, yet evidence on how their design shapes children's susceptibility to persuasion comes almost entirely from the lab. We report a $2\times2$ randomized field experiment embedded in a public German Santa Claus telephone hotline. Children's calls were randomly routed to one of four LLM voice agents varying persona (Santa, high authority, vs. Helper, low authority) and framing (persuasive nudges toward prosocial wishes vs. neutral). Of 1,072 logged calls, 89 conversations (median age 6) met inclusion criteria. Persuasive framing raised the probability of a prosocial wish from 11.6% to 45.7%, robust to controls. Persona authority showed a near-zero effect: Santa did not outperform the Helper. Persona instead shaped engagement; children hung up on the Helper far more often within the first minute (65% vs. 39%). Where context already lends an agent legitimacy, how it speaks shapes children's compliance more than who it claims to be.
