Friend or Foe? Conversational Agents in the Digital Workplace and Their Effect on Users’ Stress

Stress in the workplace and the resulting disorders present a significant challenge for the employee, employer, and national economy. According to the transactional model of stress, a possible reduction in stress can be achieved by reevaluating the situation. According to the social response theory, conversational agents should be very suitable for this task, as their increased persuasiveness leads to increased confidence of the user in their abilities. However, the perception of a social agent could also present an additional source of social evaluation stress, i.e., feeling observed and judged by another person. We propose a NeuroIS experiment utilizing EEG, ECG, and eye-tracking to resolve those opposing predictions.