Excuse Me, May I Disturb You? The Influence of Politeness of a Social Robot on the Perception of Interruptions

Social robots are finding their way into our society and must adapt to the social norms of everyday life. It is often unavoidable for robotic assistants to interrupt humans in their activities. These interruptions must therefore be designed in such a way that they have as little negative impact as possible on the ongoing activity and the perception of the robot. In this study, we investigate whether interruptions regarding health-promoting behavior delivered by a social robot in an office situation should be phrased politely rather than directly. A system was implemented to trigger either politely or directly phrased interruptions in a laboratory user study with participants executing an office task. We examined the perception of the robot, the task, and the interruption, as well as whether the health-promoting behavior was performed by the users. The results show that there were no significant differences in the perception of the robot and the interruptions, while the temporal demand of the task was perceived to be higher in the polite condition. In addition, the intention to follow the polite prompts was significantly higher, but there was no difference in the actual compliance with the prompts in the study itself. Index Terms—social robot, politeness, interruptions