Leveraging the Presence of Other Robots to Promote Acceptability of Robot Persuasion: A Field Experiment

With the widespread use of conversational robots, the study of their social influences, such as conformity, has become a pressing issue. Prior research involving robots has limited its focus to examining the conformity of robots that are in direct human presence. In this study, we investigated the influence of robots that are not directly in front of humans on conformity. Specifically, an approach that utilizes implied proponents was investigated, where a conversational robot mentions other robots in utterances, such as gossip. A dialogue system has been developed that makes use of the implied robot proponents. A field experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of the implication and quantity of robots. The results showed that implied proponents contribute to an improvement in the acceptance rate of a robot's suggestions. However, the effect of this number was limited. These results contribute to the knowledge of how people perceive the presence of robots. The results also provide suggestions for the design of dialogue strategies for systems that handle gossip and use multiple robots.