Measuring Users' Attitudinal and Behavioral Responses to Persuasive Communication Techniques in Human Robot Interaction

Many social robots have been developed to support the needs of users, such as tour guides [1] or sales robots [2], [3]. In these systems, the main purpose of the human robot interaction is to support the user's need. However, what if in addition to these capabilities, the robot had a goal of persuading the user to do something of which the user had no knowledge. What would the user's perceptions on the interaction be? We developed a social robot with the ability to employ six types of persuasion conversation logic, namely, scarcity, emotion, social identity, commitment, concreteness, and no persuasion [4] and measured the users' attitudinal and behavioral responses when interacting with our robot. In this pilot study we describe our initial results with success rates varying across all six persuasion techniques. Particular persuasion techniques demonstrated as high as a 75% success rate at directing users towards a secret task.