Poker Face Influence: Persuasive Robot with Minimal Social Cues Triggers Less Psychological Reactance

Applications of social robotics in different domains such as education, healthcare, or as companions to people living alone, often entail that robots will act as persuasive agents. However, persuasive attempts can give rise to psychological reactance where people have negative thoughts and emotions that limit adherence to the persuader. To understand the phenomenon of reactance to robotic persuaders, we investigate the effect of social cues of an artificial agent on psychological reactance and compliance. Participants in a laboratory experiment played a decision-making game in which persuasive attempts were delivered in one of three forms: as a persuasive-text, spoken by a social robot (the Socibot (TM)) displaying minimal social cues, or by the same robot displaying enhanced social cues. Our results suggest that a social robot with minimal social cues invokes the lowest reactance. Remarkably, exploratory analyses indicate cross-gender effects (between robot and user) upon invoking lower psychological reactance and female participants have higher compliance than male participants.