Overview / Usage

Social power is defined as one's ability to influence others to do something which they would not do otherwise. Different theories classify alternative ways to achieve social power, such as providing rewards, using coercion, or acting as an expert. After conceptualizing social power to allow implementation in social agents, we studied how those power strategies affect persuasion when using robots. Specifically, we attempted to design persuasive robots by creating persuasive strategies inspired by social power.

The results indicate that the project is effective in the lab. setting. Once commercialized, the project could contribute to behavior-change applications with a multitude of goals, such as maintaining a sustainable behavior.

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Methodology / Approach

We designed different experiments to examine how social robots can influence participants and persuade them to make specific decisions using different strategies inspired by the bases of social power.

More specifically, in one of the experiments, in one scenario, the robot attempts to persuade the user, by giving her/him a reward. And in another one, the robot tries to influence the user by punishing her/him if s/he does not comply with the request. Inspired from social power theory, we call the first strategy as “Reward” and the second one as “Coercion” strategy respectively. In another experiment, the robot persuaded the user to take a more challenging option in a game, by giving him/her different rewards in the game. Or in another experiment, the robot persuaded the user to select one specific option among others, by giving him/her related information about the merits of that choice.

To implement, we used the Thalamus Framework and SERA architecture. This technology could contribute in solving different problems that require persuasion, either in education or daily life such as exercising. Ethical consideration is a must in the implementation of the project in real-world applications.

Technologies Used

• Thalamus Framework
• SERA, the Socially Expressive Robotics Architecture

Documents and Presentations