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Effect of Robot’s Whispering Behavior on People’s Motivation

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Abstract

This paper presents the effect of a robot’s whispering behavior on people’s motivation. Here, “whispering behavior” consists of a whispering cue and a small voice, which provides a natural sense of physical proximity in a context of confidentiality, thus increasing intimacy. A laboratory experiment was conducted to investigate this effect. In the experiment, a robot requested the participants to perform an annoying task that involved writing as many equations in a 9×9 multiplication table as possible. The result showed that the whispering cue improved task performance as measured by the number of written equations and writing time. The small voice, however, had no effect. Furthermore, to investigate the effectiveness of a robot’s whispering behavior on recommendations, we conducted a field trial in a shopping mall. The results showed the effectiveness of whispering on recommendations, suggesting that whispering behaviors are useful for various services that aim to build motivation, such as advertisements, sales promotions, and encouragement to study.

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Notes

  1. This paper is an extended version of previous work [12], and additionally contains the results of a preliminary experiment, a report on a field trial in a shopping mall, and more detailed discussions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the staff of the Asia and Pacific Trade Center Co., Ltd. for their kind cooperation. We also thank Yoshifumi Nakagawa, Seiji Tachibana, Hiroshi Atsuta, Guan Wenjiao, and Tong Mingyu of the Kiban-PP project at Osaka University for their help. This research was supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligent Robotics and Communication Labs., ATR, 2-2-2 Hikaridai Keihanna-Sci. City, Kyoto, Japan

    Kayako Nakagawa, Masahiro Shiomi, Kazuhiko Shinozawa, Reo Matsumura, Hiroshi Ishiguro & Norihiro Hagita

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  1. Kayako Nakagawa
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  2. Masahiro Shiomi
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  3. Kazuhiko Shinozawa
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  6. Norihiro Hagita
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Correspondence to Kayako Nakagawa.

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Nakagawa, K., Shiomi, M., Shinozawa, K. et al. Effect of Robot’s Whispering Behavior on People’s Motivation. Int J of Soc Robotics 5, 5–16 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-012-0141-3

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