A Robot Jumping the Queue: Expectations About Politeness and Power During Conflicts in Everyday Human-Robot Encounters

Title of the Paper

A Robot Jumping the Queue: Expectations About Politeness and Power During Conflicts in Everyday Human-Robot Encounters

Paper Information

• Research Area: Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Human Behavior, and Service Robot Design
• Keywords: Human-Robot Collaboration, Persuasive Techniques, Expectations, Social Roles, Power

Research Background and Problem

• Problem or Challenge: As service robots become increasingly prevalent in public spaces, conflicts between humans and robots over resource competition (e.g., elevator priority) are becoming more common. The behavior of robots in such situations may conflict with human expectations (e.g., politeness and submissiveness), potentially affecting people's acceptance of and willingness to cooperate with robots.
• Significance: If robots fail to effectively prioritize tasks (e.g., delivering food on time), it could not only impact service efficiency but also exacerbate human resistance to robots. Understanding and designing appropriate interaction models is therefore crucial.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: Current designs mostly focus on situational strategies (e.g., polite requests) but lack exploration of deeper social role expectations (e.g., whether robots are perceived as equal interaction partners). The authors aim to compare the effectiveness of situational strategies versus altering users' perceptions of robots' social roles, addressing this research gap.

Solution

• Proposed Solution:
  • Investigate the dual impact of polite requests (situational strategies) and power dynamics expectations (adjusting social role cognition by changing people's expectations of robot behavior) on robot acceptance and willingness to cooperate.
  • Introduce a multi-level experimental design manipulating three variables: expected robot behavior (submissive or assertive), request strategy (polite request or direct command), and actual behavior (whether the robot enters the elevator first).
• Innovations:
  • First-time joint investigation of the effects of politeness strategies and the alignment/violation of human expectations regarding power asymmetry with robots, directly comparing these two mechanisms influencing robot acceptance.
  • Situating human-robot conflicts in everyday scenarios (e.g., shared elevator use), emphasizing realism and decision-making pressure.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Conduct online experiments simulating elevator scenarios with different experimental groups (submissive/assertive expectations; polite request/command; robot behavior).
  2. Test participants' acceptance of the robot, politeness evaluation, trust level, and willingness to cooperate.
  3. Record user reactions to alignment or violation of variables and compare experimental results with human service worker scenarios.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:
  1. Violating power expectations (expecting submissive robots but observing assertive behavior) significantly reduced acceptance of robots but had a smaller impact on willingness to cooperate.
  2. When robots politely requested priority, a higher proportion of participants were inclined to let the robot go first, but this effect was significantly amplified by changes in expectations. For example, polite behavior from robots expected to be assertive significantly increased cooperation intentions (83% of participants intended to yield priority).
  3. Polite request strategies (“Would you please let me go first?”) were more favored than direct commands (“Let me go first!”), but politeness alone could not mitigate the negative impact of assertive robot behavior.
  4. Participants were more likely to cooperate with imagined human elevator requests, indicating that robots occupy a lower social role in cognition.
• Advantages:
  • Emphasizes the interaction mechanism between social roles and politeness strategies, providing theoretical guidance for designing service robots in social scenarios.
  • Experimental data clearly identifies best practices for robot design in conflict environments.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • Polite requests can alleviate some conflicts, but the prevailing societal expectation of "submissiveness" in robots remains widespread. Long-term and comprehensive cognitive shifts are needed to enhance robots' effectiveness among humans.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  1. Online simulated experiments may not fully reflect real-world robot interaction experiences, such as the potential impact of robot size and speed on behavior.
  2. The experiments involved one-time interactions; future studies should explore the impact of long-term, multi-round interactions on expectation changes.
  3. The design of human-controlled scenarios (e.g., direct comparisons between humans and robots) could be further optimized.

This study demonstrates that people's social role cognition of service robots significantly influences their acceptance and the effectiveness of behavior strategies. Future robot designs should not only adjust specific situational strategies but also comprehensively consider how to shape and alter public expectations of robots' social roles.