Dealing with Moral Assistance in Robot-Supported Decision Making for Sustainable Consumption

Aiming to foster responsible and sustainable consumption, we developed a shopping scenario with an assistive robot that intervenes with shopping requests when they are at odds with the agreed shopping agenda. While a former quantitative analysis of the experimental setup gave insights on participants’ acceptance of the robot interventions, this paper reports the results of a qualitative analysis of the decision-making processes with the assistive shopping robot. Inspired by conversation analysis, we explore how test participants (TPs) react to the robot’s interventions. The analysis shows that TPs are doing much more than just rejecting or accepting the robot’s interventions, but rather e.g. reformulate their requests, ask for help or give accounts for their choices. The paper differentiates six different response formats and discusses what we can learn from them about decision-making with assistive shopping robots and sustainable shopping.