The impact of smart voice assistants' humor styles on perceived morality

Smart voice assistants have increasingly integrated humor into their interactions with consumers. However, as these technologies become more human-like, concerns regarding the moral quality of their humor emerge, given that inappropriate humor can demean others and lead to perceptions of low morality.<br/> This study defines consumers' moral judgment of smart voice assistants' behavior as perceived morality and investigates how different humor styles influence this perception. We conducted a survey with users, categorizing smart voice assistants into five distinct humor styles and randomly assigning one style to each participant. The results indicated that affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, and self-defeating humor positively influenced consumer attitudes and perceived morality, while aggressive humor yielded a negative effect. Additionally, we found that the influence of humor styles on consumer attitudes can be mediated by perceived morality. Implicit theory significantly moderates the effects of affiliative and aggressive humor on perceived morality and attitudes. Incremental theorists demonstrated that stronger affiliative humor correlated with higher perceived morality and more favorable attitudes, whereas entity theorists noted that stronger aggressive humor was associated with lower perceived morality and less favorable attitudes.<br/> This study provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the effective use of humor in smart voice assistants and offers practical guidelines for developers and marketers regarding the careful and appropriate application of humor based on consumer characteristics.