Anthropomorphism and Trust in Human-Large Language Model interactions

Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction [Submitted on 1 Mar 2026] Anthropomorphism and Trust in Human-Large Language Model interactions Akila Kadambi, Ylenia D'Elia, Tanishka Shah, Iulia Comsa, Alison Lentz, Katie Siri-Ngammuang, Tara Buechler, Jonas Kaplan, Antonio Damasio, Srini Narayanan, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh With large language models (LLMs) becoming increasingly prevalent in daily life, so too has the tendency to attribute to them human-like minds and emotions, or anthropomorphize them. Here, we investigate dimensions people use to anthropomorphize and attribute trust toward LLMs across more than 2,000 human-LLM interactions. Participants (N=115) engaged with LLM chatbots systematically varied in warmth (friendliness), competence (capability, coherence), and empathy (cognitive and affective). Warmth and cognitive empathy significantly predicted perceptions on all outcomes (perceived anthropomorphism, trust, similarity, relational closeness, frustration, usefulness), while competence predicted all outcomes except for anthropomorphism. Affective empathy primarily predicted perceived relational measures, but did not predict the epistemic outcomes. Topic sub-analyses showed that more subjective, personally relevant topics (e.g., relationship advice) amplified these effects, producing greater human-likeness and relational connection with the LLM than did objective topics. Together, these findings reveal that warmth, competence, and empathy are key dimensions through which people attribute relational and epistemic perceptions to artificial agents. Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.15316 [cs.HC]   (or arXiv:2604.15316v1 [cs.HC] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15316 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Akila Kadambi [view email] [v1] Sun, 1 Mar 2026 21:55:58 UTC (2,140 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.HC < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)