Social bots of conviction as dialogue facilitators for history education: Promoting historical empathy in teens through dialogue

Within the broad range of the various types of chatbots, “bots of conviction” (BoCs) shift the focus from offering information to provoking reflection. In this paper we present the design of a “social” BoC, i.e. one designed to engage not one user but a group of participants in reflective dialogue, with the bot and each other. Our social BoC is designed as a digital experience to support history education for high school students (ages 14-18) and was evaluated with a total of 15 teenagers split into 5 groups. The goal was to assess the efficacy of our approach as a tool to promote historical empathy through dialogue. Our findings highlight the BoC's role in engaging the students in constructive dialogue with each other; and the ways in which it guided perspective taking and collective reflection about the past, while at the same time foregrounding connections to the present.