Bon Appetit! Robot Persuasion for Food Recommendation
Sarita Herse, Jonathan Vitale, Daniel Ebrahimian, Meg Tonkin, Suman Ojha, Sidra Sidra, Benjamin F. Johnston, Sophie Phillips, Siva Leela Krishna Chand Gudi, Jesse Clark, William Q. Judge, Mary‐Anne Williams · 2018
The integration of social robots within service industries requires social robots to be persuasive. We conducted a vignette experiment to investigate the persuasiveness of a human, robot, and an information kiosk when offering consumers a restaurant recommendation. We found that embodiment type significantly affects the persuasiveness of the agent, but only when using a specific recommendation sentence. These preliminary results suggest that human-like features of an agent may serve to boost persuasion in recommendation systems. However, the extent of the effect is determined by the nature of the given recommendation.