Non-Verbal Cues on Robot-Group Persuasion

When integrating robots into human daily life, persuasive power can be essential. However, there are often group dynamics which can complicate persuasion. This study focuses on how non-verbal cues, specifically gaze and hand gestures, affect the persuasiveness of a social robot. We have designed a protocol to include non-verbal cues in the social robot Vizzy (head and eye gaze, hand gestures) and test them in a series of experiments using the paradigm of the ”Desert Survival Challenge”. The goal of the robot is to persuade the participants of the game into changing their answers whilst avoiding negative feelings. It is hypothesized that the non- verbal cues will help avoid psychological reactance without diminishing compliance to the verbal requests issued by the robot. This phenomenon has been verified before for single person persuasion, but it is yet to be tested on groups. Thus, the goal of this project is to verify the effect of non-verbal cues in group persuasion by a robot and comparing it to single person persuasion. The results showed that the robot’s gestures increased compliance by the group and the gaze behaviour decreased psychological reactance.