Personalized to Persuade: The Effects of Contextualization and Warmth on Trust and Reliance in Conversational AI

Abstract

Contextualization is a form of personalization in which the message is framed in a context meaningful to the recipient, using their interests and background. Personalization is a known persuasive strategy of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in politics and marketing. However, the persuasive effect of contextualization in everyday tasks, where users often lack prior knowledge, remains unclear. We ran a $2\times2$ between-subjects experiment ($N = 407$) in a fictional scenario where participants had no prior opinions or knowledge. We examined how contextualization, combined with conversational warmth, shapes the persuasive power of an AI assistant arguing against expert recommendations and users' reliance on it. Our findings show that the neutral, non-contextualized assistant was the most persuasive. Contextualization and warmth each reduced persuasiveness on their own, but their interaction increased it. Reliance was present in all conditions, and neither cue changed it detectably. Trust predicted persuasion and reliance, yet neither contextualization nor warmth had an indirect effect through trust. Participants with higher self-reported AI literacy relied more on the assistant without trusting it more. Our study extends AI personalization research from political opinions to everyday decisions made without prior knowledge. The results suggest that users are more likely to be persuaded by, and defer to, an AI assistant than an expert, even without personalization. AI persuasion experiments should therefore include untailored assistants and measure decisions; the cues that changed persuasion did not detectably change reliance.