Designing persuasive robots

Abstract

Social robots have to potential to serve as personal, organizational, and public assistants as, for instance, diet coaches, teacher's aides, and emergency respondents. The success of these robots - whether in motivating users to adhere to a diet regimen or in encouraging them to follow evacuation procedures in the case of a fire - will rely largely on their ability to persuade people. Research in a range of areas from political communication to education suggest that the nonverbal behaviors of a human speaker play a key role in the persuasiveness of the speaker's message and the listeners' compliance with it. In this paper, we explore how a robot might effectively use these behaviors, particularly vocal and bodily cues, to persuade users. In an experiment with 32 participants, we evaluate how manipulations in a robot's use of nonverbal cues affected participants' perceptions of the robot's persuasiveness and their compliance with the robot's suggestions across four conditions: (1) no vocal or bodily cues, (2) vocal cues only, (3) bodily cues only, and (4) vocal and bodily cues. The results showed that participants complied with the robot's suggestions significantly more when it used nonverbal cues than they did when it did not use these cues and that bodily cues were more effective in persuading participants than vocal cues were. Our model of persuasive nonverbal cues and experimental results have direct implications for the design of persuasive behaviors for humanlike robots.