Are You Trying to Be Funny? The Impact of Affiliative Humor of Smart Home Technologies on Human-Like Trust

Smart home technologies (SHTs) perform tasks in the most intimate areas of life and therefore require blind user trust from the start. To build this trust, vendors often rely on creating human-like interactions with devices, such as by incorporating humor. Although humor in SHTs is becoming more advanced, e.g., through advanced joke selection algorithms, its actual impact is largely unexplored. In this work, we address this gap and study the impact of affiliative humor as a human-like characteristic on perceived social presence and initial trust in SHTs. To this end, we conducted a vignette-based experiment with potential users (N=63). Our results contribute by uncovering the mechanisms underlying humor as a trust-building characteristic in SHTs. Moreover, in this way, we also provide important insights for the design and communication of SHTs, which can be valuable for vendors to foster perceived human-likeness and thus initial user trust in smart technologies.