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Article published In: What Influences Influence? How the Communicative Situation Influences Persuasion
Edited by Kerstin Fischer and Jaap Ham
[Interaction Studies 22:3] 2021
► pp. 396–415

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More than advice

The influence of adding references to prior discourse and signals of empathy on the persuasiveness of an advice-giving robot

 | University of Southern Denmark
 | Eindhoven University of Technology
Published online: 28 March 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.00010.lan
Abstract
Persuasive social robots can influence human behavior through giving advice. The current study investigates whether references to prior discourse and signals of empathy make an advice-giving robot an even more effective persuader and whether participants follow the robot’s advice and drink even more water when the robot additionally uses these strategies. We recruited students and university staff for a lab-study in which three different robot personalities on the same robot type presented health-related information. In one condition, the robot gave advice and referred to something mentioned earlier in the conversation (i.e., to dialog history), in another condition, the robot gave advice and used empathic signals, and in the third condition, the robot gave advice only. Our results show that participants drank significantly more when the advice-giving robot also used the persuasive strategies of empathy and references to dialog history than when the robot only gave advice. This study shows that both strategies increase the persuasiveness of the robot and makes it more influential.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous work
    • 2.1Empathy in human-robot interaction
    • 2.2Reference to prior discourse (dialog history)
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants and study design
      • 3.1.1Experimental conditions
    • 3.2Materials and measures
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Future work
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (25)
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