Rejecting unsolicited offers in human-robot interaction

This paper reports on a semi-experimental study involving a social, persuasive robot. The robot is designed to offer drinks (water) to the elderly, and in this user test it offers water to people on a university campus. The paper describes situations where the human participants reject the offer, and how the robot challenges the rejection by providing a persuasion turn. The persuasion is rarely followed by an acceptance but instead leads to an account for the rejection from the human participant. The paper describes how participants mobilize glasses and water bottles that are already available to account for the rejection and thereby orient to the inappositeness of the offer. The paper discusses the limitations of the experiment for projecting how the end-user might interact with the robot.