Receptionist or Information Kiosk: How Do People Talk With a Robot?

The mental structures that people apply towards other people have been shown to influence the way people cooperate with others. These mental structures or schemas evoke behavioral scripts. In this paper, we explore two different scripts, receptionist and information kiosk, that we propose channeled visitors' interactions with an interactive robot. We analyzed visitors' typed verbal responses to a receptionist robot in a university building. Half of the visitors greeted the robot (e.g., "hello") prior to interacting with it. Greeting the robot significantly predicted a more social script: more relational conversational strategies such as sociable interaction and politeness, attention to the robot's narrated stories, self-disclosure, and less negative/rude behaviors. The findings suggest people's first words in interaction can predict their schematic orientation to an agent, making it possible to design agents that adapt to individuals during interaction. We propose designs for interactive computational agents that can elicit people's cooperation.