Swipe right: When and why conservatives are more accepting of AI recommendations

Abstract

Six studies ( N = 1548) and a single ad study on Facebook examine the influence of political ideology on the likelihood of accepting AI‐generated recommendations in categories such as movie streaming, music streaming, and recipe websites. Contrary to conventional wisdom and prior empirical findings that conservatives are less accepting of technology, the current research finds that conservatives are more likely than liberals to accept AI‐generated recommendations. This occurs because conservatives have a higher resistance to change in general, which leads them to have a greater preference for consistency in consumption contexts. Consequently, given the widely held belief that AI‐generated recommendations are primarily based on one's own past preferences and behaviors, such recommendations are found to be more appealing to conservatives than liberals. However, this effect is attenuated when consumers recognize or infer that the AI lacks knowledge of their past preferences and behaviors. These findings contribute to the literature on the predictive power of political ideology for a litany of consumption‐relevant behaviors while also adding nuance to our understanding of the relationship between political ideology and acceptance of new technology.