Rejecting a robot’s offer: An analysis of preference

Since the development of commercial robots dedicated to service or social encounters, there have been numerous appearances of such devices in public spaces or corporate buildings. However, their purpose might not be self-evident and the modalities for using it might not be self-explainable. Moreover, ‘talking’ to a robot that imitates a receptionist could raise practical problems, given the fact that ‘talk’ among humans is an interactional resource for performing actions that carry social dimensions. This paper focuses on the dimension of ‘preference organization’; specifically, offer rejections that are dispreferred among humans. Based on conversation analysis of human-robot interactions recorded in a university library, we examined 95 occurrences of how library users rejected offers of assistance initiated by a humanoid robot, Pepper. We identified three embodied rejection practices embedded in other courses of activity among groups of library users. Such practices show how users index their own orientation towards the transposition (or not) of human interactional norms that are borne with rejections as marked social moves.