The role of politeness in human–machine interactions: a systematic literature review and future perspectives

The growing prevalence of interactions between humans and machines, coupled with the rapid development of intelligent and human-like features in technology, necessitates considering the potential implications that an increasingly inter-personal interaction style might have on human behavior. Particularly, since human–human interactions are fundamentally affected by politeness rules, several researchers are investigating if such social norms have some implications also within human–machine interactions. This paper reviews scientific works dealing with politeness issues within human–machine interactions by considering a variety of artificial intelligence systems, such as smart devices, robots, digital assistants, and self-driving cars. This paper aims to analyze scientific results to answer the questions of why technological devices should behave politely toward humans, but above all, why human beings should be polite toward a technological device. As a result of the analysis, this paper wants to outline future research directions for the design of more effective, socially competent, acceptable, and trustworthy intelligent systems.