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Article published In:
What Influences Influence? How the Communicative Situation Influences Persuasion
Edited by Kerstin Fischer and Jaap Ham
[Interaction Studies 22:3] 2021
► pp. 488–515

In the same boat

The influence of sharing the situational context on a speaker’s (a robot’s) persuasiveness

| University of Southern Denmark
| University of Southern Denmark
| Independent researcher

In this paper, we analyze what effects indicators of a shared situation have on a speaker’s persuasiveness by investigating how a robot’s advice is received when it indicates that it is sharing the situational context with its user. In our experiment, 80 participants interacted with a robot that referred to aspects of the shared context: Face tracking indicated that the robot saw the participant, incremental feedback suggested that the robot was following their actions, and comments about, and gestures towards, the shared physical situation and linguistic references to the dialog history indicated to participants that the robot had learned from the interaction and perceived its surroundings. The results show that especially the linguistic and gestural references to the shared context have a significant influence on participants’ compliance with the robot’s suggestions. Thus, indicating that it is ‘in the same boat’ with the user, i.e. that it is sharing the situational context, increases a robot’s persuasiveness during advice giving.

Keywords: influence, human-robot interaction, shared context, dialog history, incremental feedback, persuasion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work
    • 2.1Dialog history
    • 2.2Perceiving the partner
    • 2.3References to the shared context
    • 2.4Incremental response
    • 2.5Summary and research questions
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Experimental conditions and manipulations
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Interaction protocol
    • 3.4Subjective measures
    • 3.5Objective measures
    • 3.6Robot
    • 3.7Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Subjective measures
    • 4.2Objective measures
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions and future work
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.00013.fis
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