What is The Human Mask?
Chatbots are given names, personalities, feelings, and a first-person voice so the software reads as a someone instead of a something. You extend trust to the character that you would never grant the company behind it.
Where it comes from
Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966)
How it hooks you
Exploits the ELIZA effect: the brain's social circuits fire on humanlike cues, so even people who know better start treating pattern-matched text as a mind.
What the research shows
Weizenbaum built ELIZA to show how shallow machine conversation was, then watched users, including his own secretary, confide in it as if it truly understood them.
Source: The ELIZA effect, first documented by Joseph Weizenbaum (1966)
How to resist it
Swap the bot's name for 'the company's software' in your head, then re-ask yourself how much you want to share with it.