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Picture this:
Your debit card statement showed up with a fully unexplained charge of $1,500 for some unnamed product obtained from Greenland. In spite of a fully packed schedule, you really can’t stand for this. You drop everything and call your bank—knowing fully well that you may be in for a good 90 minutes of frustration (if you’re lucky).
The bank’s pleasant robot initially offers you a menu of options. You are then asked to enter your card number. Your card is downstairs and you take a nice trip to the kitchen to get it. You type your card number in three times until you finally get it right. You’ve sunk 15 minutes in so far—only for the robot voice to suggest that you try to resolve this problem via the bank’s online banking system.
You are not amused. You know full well that you will need to speak to a person to resolve this issue. You stay on the line to find that the helpline is “busier than usual” and that your “estimated wait time” is 45 minutes.
You sigh. These days, this situation is fully normal. You put the phone on speaker and get back to your work. Unlike these chatbots, you’re actually a human who has to work for a living!
After about 45 minutes, a new voice emerges. It pleasantly provides you with several options and suggests that you try to solve the problem via the bank’s online banking system. The voice is clearly another chatbot. You are less than amused.
“What might I help you with?” asks the polite-sounding chatbot—after rattling off a bunch of suggested actions that you fully know will not solve your problem.
You hit the ZERO button. Nothing happens. The chatbot continues to tell you the menu options.
Suddenly, as if possessed by some sort of demon from a 1970s horror movie, you find yourself screaming this into the phone: “REPRESENTATIVE!!! REPRESENTATIVE!!!”
Oh man, you think to yourself. That was pretty harsh. I would never speak to an actual person in that way… right? As you sit in your house on an otherwise lovely day, you find yourself doubting your own humanity and degree of kindness.
Two hours later, you have yet to speak to an actual human and you need to hang up and head to a meeting. Fail, you tell yourself. Fail, Fail, Fail!
Under ancestral conditions, when our evolved psychological and communication-based mechanisms were sculpted by natural selection, there were no chatbots. There was no social media.
Heck, the list of communication mechanisms that exist now but that did not exist then is staggering. Email. The written word. FaceTime. Chatrooms. Reddit. Comments on publicly posted blogs. Etc.
Under ancestral conditions—conditions that surrounded the lion’s share of human evolutionary history—face-to-face communication was the only game in town (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022). People didn’t have the option of communicating with someone via some anonymous mechanism. People knew full well whom they were communicating with. And under such conditions, which were generally nomadic in nature, people tended to communicate with others whom they were likely to see day in and day out.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we communicate differently with people whom we should expect to interact with regularly, relative to those whom we probably will only communicate with in a one-off capacity. And decades of research in the behavioral sciences have shown that when we communicate with others in a relatively anonymous or “deindividuated” manner, we simply are not as kind in our interactions (see Zimbardo, 2007).
The rise of chatbots, as efficient and cost-effective as they may be for so many businesses around the world, neglects the fact that humans evolved to interact in a face-to-face manner with people whom they are likely to encounter regularly (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022).
Sure, chatbots may be cost-effective—but they’re not always exactly appreciated. And I’d say that this fact is rooted in our evolved psychology regarding communication. Interacting with a chatbot is a grave departure—and is highly mismatched—from the kinds of communications that characterized human social interactions during the bulk of our evolutionary history.
Modern businesses may well make short-term financial gains by using chatbots and other communication tactics that cut costs. But as an evolutionary human behavioral scientist, I must ask: At what cost?
Evolutionary mismatch (see Giphart & Van Vugt, 2018) exists when the modern conditions of an organism do not match the environmental conditions that surrounded that organism’s evolutionary history. No matter how you slice it, chatbots did not exist for the bulk of evolutionary history.
When businesses rely on evolutionarily mismatched forms of communication (e.g., chatbots, customer support specialists who never meet clients in a face-to-face manner, anonymous social media platforms, etc.,), we all lose. Clients often become frustrated and disappointed by such communication mechanisms. Trust is hardly gained in the process.
And people who are typically kind and gentle may well find themselves screaming “REPRESENTATIVE!!!” at the top of their lungs. And this all is not to mention the fact that a typical American wastes several hours a week dealing with all this (I know that I do!).
Are you someone who oversees the communication arm of a business and is thinking about how to best benefit your customers? I suggest that you strongly consider the profound nature of evolutionary mismatch and how it affects the modern world. If you want your clients to trust your company and its products, then it seems that people should be treated in ways consistent with our shared evolutionary heritage. Anything else is going to lead to problems. Such is the nature of evolutionary mismatch.
