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13 - Appeals to Expertise Make Robots Persuasive in Human-Robot Healthcare Interaction

from IV - Persuasion and Algorithms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2025

By
Rosalyn M. Langedijk  and
Kerstin Fischer
Edited by
Sofia Rüdiger  and
Daria Dayter
Sofia Rüdiger
Affiliation:
Universität Bayreuth, Germany
Daria Dayter
Affiliation:
Tampere University, Finland
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Summary

In this paper, we investigate whether appeals to expertise make robots persuasive and provide evidence on the influence of single persuasive messages in human-robot interactions. We explore the effects of two different kinds of persuasive strategies on people’s behavior and subjective evaluation of the robot: appeals to participants’ own expertise on the one hand and reference to research on the other. We present a controlled lab study in a healthcare scenario with professional elderly care workers as our participants, where the aim is to address dehydration. We study attitudinal and behavioral effects of these strategies of influence; specifically, we measure participants’ water intake after the interaction, as well as their subjective ratings of the robot. Our results show that both strategies have influence on participants’ water intake while the reference to one’s own expertise yields significant behavioral effects.

Keywords

dialogue designpersuasive dialoguehuman-robot interactionelderly caredehydrationinfluence
Type
Chapter
Information
Manipulation, Influence and Deception
The Changing Landscape of Persuasive Language
 , pp. 277 - 294
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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