ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1454197
Chatbot-Aided Product Purchases Among Generation Z: The Role of Personality Traits
Provisionally accepted
- Shanghai University of Sport, Shanghai, China
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The rapid integration of machine learning has positioned product recommendation chatbots as essential tools in the e-commerce landscape, shaping how consumers engage and make purchasing decisions. Generation Z, as a tech-savvy and AI-adept demographic, plays a central role in this transformation. While prior studies have examined chatbot-consumer interactions, limited research has explored how both personality traits and information source characteristic jointly influence purchase intentions. This study develops an integrative framework to assess how the Big Five personality traits-extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and opennessand key chatbot features-expertise, interactivity, trustworthiness, and customization-affect Generation Z's willingness to purchase chatbot-recommended products. The moderating role of personal innovativeness is also examined. Data were collected from 480 Generation Z chatbot users in China through an online survey and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM), artificial neural networks (ANN), and necessary condition analysis (NCA). Results indicate that extraversion, agreeableness, openness, expertise, interactivity, and customization significantly influence purchase intention. Moreover, personal innovativeness positively moderates the effect of extraversion on purchase intention. These findings contribute to the literature by bridging personality psychology and human-AI interaction and offer practical insights for enhancing chatbot effectiveness in e-commerce.
Keywords: Product Recommendation Chatbots, Generation Z, Big Five Personality Traits, Source Characteristics of Information, SEM-ANN-NCA
Received: 08 Nov 2024; Accepted: 07 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jialiang Chen, Shanghai University of Sport, Shanghai, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.