PUBLICATION
Toward an Adaptable Chatbot: Can Response Form Reduce Frustration, and for Whom?
Type
Conference Paper
Year
2026
Authors
Research Area
Web Engineering
Event
The 27th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering WISE 2026
Published in
The 27th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering WISE 2026
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Conversational agents typically present the same response style to every user. When a chatbot cannot do what a user asks, frustration is often unavoidable — but the way the limitation is communicated is a design choice, and we ask whether adjusting it reduces frustration. In a vignette-rating experiment (N = 235), participants rated frustration and trust over chatbot responses to a fixed, frustrating scenario that varied along length, uncertainty, and formality. We estimated populationlevel effects with linear mixed-effects models and tested whether individual differences in form sensitivity form discrete user profiles or vary continuously. We found that longer and more formal responses reduced frustration while uncertainty had only a small effect; that trust moved through the same two dimensions in the corresponding direction and was unaffected by uncertainty; and that frustration and trust were strongly and negatively coupled within participants (r=− .80). Sensitivity to the three dimensions studied varied continuously and independently rather than forming discrete types, and was barely predictable from individual differences: most participants were less frustrated by more formal responses, length divided them (a majority less frustrated by longer responses, a substantial minority more), and uncertainty barely registered. These results suggest that adjusting response form — length above all — is a low-cost lever on frustration, but that an adaptive agent must tune it to each user individually rather than to a fixed type.