Would You Help Me Voluntarily for the Next Two Years? Evaluating Psychological Persuasion Techniques in Human-Robot Interaction. First results of an empirical investigation of the door-in-the-face technique in human-robot interaction

Human-robot communication scenarios are becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we investigate the differences between human-human and human-robot communication in the context of persuasive communication. We ran an experiment using the door-in-the-face technique in a hu-manrobot context. In our experiment, participants communicated with a robot that performed the door-in-the-face technique, in which the communicating agent asks for an "extreme" favor first and a for a small favor shortly after to increase affirmative response to the second request. Our results show a surprisingly high acceptance rate for the extreme request and a smaller acceptance rate for the small request compared to the original study of Cialdini et al., so our results differ from the classical human-human door-in-the-face experiments. This suggests that human-robot persuasive communication differs from human-human communication, which is surprising given related work. We discuss potential reasons for our observations and outline the next research steps to answer the question whether the door-in-the-face and similar persuasive techniques would be effective if applied by robots. © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors

Personalizing Persuasive Principles to Improve Credibility

The role of credibility in persuasive systems is undoubted. It is therefore important that the determinants of credibility are clearly understood. Studies have asserted that personalizing persuasive principles, for instance, based on users' personality, age, or gender is more effective in influencing behavior. However, there is little knowledge on how credibility determinants can be adapted to increase a system's credibility and system persuasiveness for specific users. This paper describes ongoing research that attempts to categorize credibility determinants based on their effectiveness for different users and contexts. The paper presents the research plan and findings from three initial studies