Can social power endow social robots with the capacity to persuade? This paper represents our recent endeavor to design persuasive social robots. We have designed and run three different user studies to investigate the effectiveness of different bases of social power (inspired by French and Raven's theory) on peoples' compliance to the requests of social robots. The results show that robotic persuaders that exert social power (specifically from expert, reward, and coercion bases) demonstrate increased ability to influence humans. The first study provides a positive answer and shows that under the same circumstances, people with different personalities prefer robots using a specific social power base. In addition, social rewards can be useful in persuading individuals. The second study suggests that by employing social power, social robots are capable of persuading people objectively to select a less desirable choice among others. Finally, the third study shows that the effect of power on persuasion does not decay over time and might strengthen under specific circumstances. Moreover, exerting stronger social power does not necessarily lead to higher persuasion. Overall, we argue that the results of these studies are relevant for designing human--robot-interaction scenarios especially the ones aiming at behavioral change.

翻译：社会权力能否赋予社会机器人以说服能力？本文展示了我们近期在具有说服力的社会机器人设计方面的探索。我们设计并开展了三项不同的用户研究，以探究不同社会权力基础（受French和Raven理论启发）对人们服从社会机器人请求的有效性。结果表明，运用社会权力（特别是基于专家、奖励和强制的权力）的说服型机器人展现出更强的对人类施加影响的能力。第一项研究给出了肯定回答，并显示在相同情境下，具有不同个性的人更偏好使用特定社会权力基础的机器人。此外，社会奖励在说服个体方面具有实际效用。第二项研究表明，通过运用社会权力，社会机器人能够客观地说服人们从多个选项中做出相对不理想的选择。最后，第三项研究表明，权力对说服的影响不会随时间衰减，且在特定情境下可能增强。值得注意的是，施加更强的社会权力并不必然带来更高的说服效果。总体而言，我们认为这些研究结果对人类-机器人交互场景的设计具有重要参考价值，尤其是那些以行为改变为目标的应用场景。