PNAS study: brief AI chats drive 17,950 people to sign petitions and donate, attitudes don't predict behavior
_FelixSimon_ · x · 2026-10-20
A new PNAS paper by Kobi Hackenburg et al. reports two large preregistered experiments (17,950 responses from 14,779 people) on conversational AI persuasion.
Key findings:
- Brief AI conversations drove real-world actions: signing actual petitions and donating money to charity, with petition-signing effects up to +19.7 percentage points.
- Attitudes and behavior decoupled: there was no correlation between AI's persuasive effects on attitudes and its effects on behavior.
- Among eight persuasion strategies, information provision — the best at shifting attitudes — produced the smallest behavioral effect.
- Implication: prior research measuring only attitudinal outcomes may substantially mischaracterize AI's real-world persuasive impact.
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