Abstract
The growing interest in social robotics makes it relevant to examine the potential of robots as persuasive agents and, more specifically, to examine how robot characteristics influence the way people experience such interactions and comply with the persuasive attempts by robots. The purpose of this research is to identify how the (ostensible) gender and the facial characteristics of a robot influence the extent to which people trust it and the psychological reactance they experience from its persuasive attempts. This paper reports a laboratory study where SociBot™, a robot capable of displaying different faces and dynamic social cues, delivered persuasive messages to participants while playing a game. In-game choice behavior was logged, and trust and reactance toward the advisor were measured using questionnaires. Results show that a robotic advisor with upturned eyebrows and lips (features that people tend to trust more in humans) is more persuasive, evokes more trust, and less psychological reactance compared to one displaying eyebrows pointing down and lips curled downwards at the edges (facial characteristics typically not trusted in humans). Gender of the robot did not affect trust, but participants experienced higher psychological reactance when interacting with a robot of the opposite gender. Remarkably, mediation analysis showed that liking of the robot fully mediates the influence of facial characteristics on trusting beliefs and psychological reactance. Also, psychological reactance was a strong and reliable predictor of trusting beliefs but not of trusting behavior. These results suggest robots that are intended to influence human behavior should be designed to have facial characteristics we trust in humans and could be personalized to have the same gender as the user. Furthermore, personalization and adaptation techniques designed to make people like the robot more may help ensure they will also trust the robot.
Highlights
Social robotics is a research domain that focuses on the design of robots which socially interact with humans (Dautenhahn, 1994)
This study examines the influence of gender similarity between a robot and a human upon the trust and psychological reactance the human feels toward the robot
Psychological Reactance Based on the intertwined model of reactance by Rains and Turner (2007) as well as Dillard and Shen (2005), we took two measures of psychological reactance based on self-report: feelings of anger and negative cognitions
Summary
Social robotics is a research domain that focuses on the design of robots which socially interact with humans (Dautenhahn, 1994). Social robots show (some) human characteristics like using several verbal and non-verbal cues to express the robot’s emotions and intentions (Breazeal, 2003; Weber, 2005; Hegel et al, 2009). Interest in social robots can be traced back to the mid-1900s Trusting Her More (Goodrich and Schultz, 2007). Similar to human-human relationships, evidence suggests that trust in the robotic interaction partner is crucial for developing human-robot relationships. Earlier research (Hancock et al, 2011) suggests that robotrelated factors (such as the robot’s performance), human-related factors (like personality traits of the human), and environmental factors (for instance the complexity of the task assigned) are crucial for developing trust in human-robot interaction. A meta-analysis by Hancock et al (2011) concluded that robot characteristics are instrumental in developing trust for human-robot interaction
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