Human or machine? : an experimental study of the effects of approachability on the intention to adopt a new technology

Abstract

Use of self-service technologies (SSTs) is spreading all over the world and businesses are replacing traditional service encounter with newly developed SSTs across several industries and thus, more researchers have invested their resources to explore different factors that might influence the technology adoption and the consumers’ intention to use SSTs in various context. This paper combines the effect of approachability of new technology vs human counterpart on consumers’ intention to use a service based on the technology acceptance model and then proposes a modified model that suits the purposes of this study. An experimental study is conducted to test the model and examine the effect of approachability of both human and machine factors on technology adoption in grocery store context. Perceived ease of interaction, perceived value, extroversion and attitude towards use are other factors that are identified based on literature review and are examined in this model to better understand consumer’ behavioral intention. These factors are tested by the online experimental survey and the data collected is validated and analyzed to test the posed hypotheses. The effect of approachability of both human and machine factors was found to be significant, however, it had no significant influence on the other variables mentioned above. The other significant relationship was among the measure adopted from technology model. Effect of extraversion personality trait was found to be insignificant in all cases. The most significant relationship was between attitude toward using and intention to use. At last, the theoretical and managerial implications from are discussed based on the findings and suggestions for future research are given.