Politeness Counts: Perceptions of Peacekeeping Robots

Ohad Inbar*, Joachim Meyer

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

The 'intuitive' trust people feel when encountering robots in public spaces is a key determinant of their willingness to cooperate with these robots. We conducted four experiments to study this topic in the context of peacekeeping robots. Participants viewed scenarios, presented as static images or animations, involving a robot or a human guard performing an access-control task. The guards interacted more or less politely with younger and older male and female people. Our results show strong effects of the guard's politeness. The age and sex of the people interacting with the guard had no significant effect on participants' impressions of its attributes. There were no differences between responses to robot and human guards. This study advances the notion that politeness is a crucial determinant of people's perception of peacekeeping robots.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8669946
JournalIEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems
Volume49
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2019

Funding

FundersFunder number
U.S. Office of Naval ResearchN62909-14-1-N180

    Keywords

    • Cognitive robotics
    • etiquette
    • human-robot interaction
    • humanoid robots
    • intelligent robots
    • politeness
    • service robots

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