Persuasive polite robots in free-standing conversational groups

Politeness is at the core of the common set of behavioral norms that regulate human communication and is therefore of significant interest in the design of Human-Robot Interactions. In this paper, we investigate how the politeness behaviors of a humanoid robot impact human decisions about where to join a group of two robots. We also evaluate the resulting impact on the perception of the robot's politeness. In a study involving 59 participants, the main (Pepper) robot in the group invited participants to join using six politeness behaviors derived from Brown and Levinson's politeness theory. It requests participants to join the group at the furthest side of the group which involves more effort to reach than a closer side that is also available to the participant but would ignore the request of the robot. We evaluated the robot's effectiveness in terms of persuasiveness, politeness, and clarity. We found that more direct and explicit politeness strategies derived from the theory have a higher level of success in persuading participants to join at the furthest side of the group. We also evaluated participants' adherence to social norms i.e. not walking through the center, or o-space, of the group when joining it. Our results showed that participants tended to adhere to social norms when joining at the furthest side by not walking through the center of the group of robots, even though they were informed that the robots were fully automated.