What if I Use Help for This? Exploring Normative Evaluations of Relationship Maintenance Behaviors Augmented by External Agency

Abstract

Relationship maintenance needs sincere efforts made by both self and relational partners. Yet, technological development provides people with convenient access to help from external sources—other people online, or even tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI)—when performing certain relational activities. By reducing personal effort, receiving external augmentation might compromise the desired effort level in a close relationship. To explore people’s normative evaluations of such behaviors, we conducted a survey experiment (N = 114) wherein participants provided their evaluations of 25 common relational activities in friendship maintenance. Most activities were considered as requiring sincere efforts and subjective in nature. We found that the more sincere efforts and the more subjectivity a relational activity required, the more inappropriate people considered it being augmented by another human or AI system. These results together advance our knowledge of how technology-mediated interactions are judged in interpersonal relationships.