What Makes a Good Robotic Advisor? The Role of Assertiveness in Human-Robot Interaction

The display of different levels of assertiveness by a robot can be an essential factor in determining the way it is perceived and the extent to which it can influence its users. To explore the persuasive abilities of social robots, we devised an interactive storytelling scenario, in which users had to make several decisions while being persuaded by two autonomous robots (each one displaying low, high or neutral levels of assertiveness). To evaluate how different levels of assertiveness affected the decision-making process, we conducted a user study (n=61) in which we measured participants' perceptions of the robots, the valence of their emotional state and level of assertiveness. Our findings revealed that (a) the user's perception of assertive robots differed from their initial expectations about robots in general and (b) that robots displaying personality were more effective at influencing participants to change their decisions than robots displaying a neutral arrangement of traits.