The Power to Persuade: a study of Social Power in Human-Robot Interaction

Recent advances on Social Robotics raise the question whether a social robot can be used as a persuasive agent. To date, a body of literature has been performed using various approaches to answer this research question, ranging from the use of non-verbal behavior to the exploration of different embodiment characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the role of social power for making social robots more persuasive. Social power is defined as one’s ability to influence another to do something which s/he would not do without the presence of such power. Different theories classify alternative ways to achieve social power, such as providing a reward, using coercion, or acting as an expert. In this work, we explored two types of persuasive strategies that are based on social power (specifically Reward and Expertise) and created two social robots that would employ such strategies. To examine the effectiveness of these strategies we performed a user study with 51 participants using two social robots in an adversarial setting in which both robots try to persuade the user on a concrete choice. The results show that even though each of the strategies caused the robots to be perceived differently in terms of their competence and warmth, both were similarly persuasive.