One Style Fits All? Cultural Values Embedded in Conversational AI via a People-Pleasing Lens

Yi-Jun Chen, I-Tsen Hsieh, Li-Wun Chang


Abstract
Conversational AI systems trained on large-scale web corpora inevitably encode the cultural values and interactional norms embedded in their training data, yet our understanding of how deployed LLMs reflect or reinforce culture-specific social expectations remains limited. This study examined how supportive versus challenging chatbot interaction styles shape user experience and continuance intention, and whether people-pleasing tendency (PPT) moderates these effects across cultures. Taiwanese (N = 49) and Korean (N = 52) participants completed a collaborative tourism-planning task. Results showed that: (1) supportive chatbots consistently led to higher continuance intention, satisfaction, and trust; (2) PPT did not moderate these effects; and (3) cultural variation emerged only in perceived threat, where higher PPT was associated with greater baseline threat in the Taiwanese but not the Korean sample. These findings reveal how a general-purpose LLM style may differentially activate culturally situated social scripts, raising implications for culturally inclusive conversational AI design.
Anthology ID:
2026.c3nlp-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP 2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Sunipa Dev, Luciana Benotti, Daniel Hershcovich, Yong Cao, Li Zhou, BOlei Ma, Ife Adebara
Venues:
C3NLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
187–203
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.c3nlp-1.15/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi-Jun Chen, I-Tsen Hsieh, and Li-Wun Chang. 2026. One Style Fits All? Cultural Values Embedded in Conversational AI via a People-Pleasing Lens. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP 2026), pages 187–203, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
One Style Fits All? Cultural Values Embedded in Conversational AI via a People-Pleasing Lens (Chen et al., C3NLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.c3nlp-1.15.pdf