Cheerful encouragement or careful listening: The dynamics of robot etiquette at Children's different developmental stages

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106697Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The present study proposes a set of politeness principles for social robots.

  • Robots' politeness can improve children's perception and evaluations of robots.

  • The priority of the principles varies with children's social developmental stages.

Abstract

Social robots employed for childcare must conform to the norms of human society if they are to help children acquire valuable interpersonal interaction skills through the inculcation of behavioral attributes such as politeness. A survey of working parents identified certain behavioral principles necessary for social robots used with children at varying stages of their social development. A set of politeness principles was derived from scholarly discussions on human courtesy to design appropriately polite social robots. In communicating courteously with children, social robots must be able to express intimacy (i.e., friendliness), respect opinions (i.e., agreeableness), and remember previous interactions (i.e., attentiveness). These principles should improve children's evaluation of the robots and enhance their perception of the machines' sociality, likability, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness. The results obtained from this study confirm that the priorities of etiquette must be modified according to the developmental stages of children. These outcomes offer practical implications for the design of social robots.

Introduction

Humans are collective rather than isolationist by nature; they are inclined to gather and formulate societies that enable and enhance interpersonal interaction. This tendency to interact and collaborate with others and to form social groups is called sociality and is thus an essential characteristic of all members of any community. Reflecting the basic needs of human relationships, recent advancements in artificial-intelligence-powered social robots continuously highlight the social aspects of human–robot interaction and suggest ways of ameliorating robots' sociality (Fong, Nourbakhsh, & Dautenhahn, 2003). Because users interact with robots in the same manner as they communicate with other human beings using identical social rules (Kim, Park, & Sundar, 2013; Lee, Jung, Kim, & Kim, 2006; Lee, Park, & Song, 2005; Lee, Peng, Jin, & Yan, 2006; Leite et al., 2013; Nass, Steuer, & Tauber, 1994; Reeves & Nass, 1996; Sundar, Jung, Waddell, & Kim, 2017), it is believed that robots' socially appropriate behaviors will promote user perceptions of their reliability, resulting in increasing their public acceptance (Saunderson & Nejat, 2019). Thus, integrating social principles into the design of robots' behaviors will improve users’ interaction experience, making robots conform to human social norms.

Politeness is one of the most influential interaction principles naturally used to regulate everyday communication between humans. It allows individuals to communicate more naturally and harmoniously with each other (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Holtgraves & Perdew, 2016; Holtgraves & Yang, 1990; Jansen & Janssen, 2010) and also positively enhances the interaction experience with machines, including wearable devices (Dorneich, Ververs, Mathan, Whitlow, & Hayes, 2012), autonomous vehicles (Lee, Lee, & Ryu, 2019), and robots (Inbar & Meyer, 2019; Torrey, Fussell, & Kiesler, 2013; Zhu & Kaber, 2012). However, little is known about the comprehensive influences of the various polite behaviors that robots can exhibit beyond designing a single etiquette behavior and evaluating their impacts. Thus, a more integrative approach that explores a series of behavioral principles is desirable for promoting a better understanding of the mechanism of social robot politeness.

The present study proposes etiquette principles for social robots designed specifically for children, who constitute an important target group for social robot research as they are particularly sensitive to robots' sociality (Belpaeme et al., 2013; Kahn, Gary, & Shen, 2012a; Salter, Werry, & Michaud, 2008; Vollmer, Read, Trippas, & Belpaeme, 2018). Moreover, their interaction can be substantially influenced by robots' behaviors, and this interaction may influence their socialization process, because children are still developing their sociality through interactions with parents, friends, teachers, and others in their surrounding environment. For example, a study revealed that children are more indiscriminate than adults, showing more altruistic behaviors to social robots in need of assistance (Martin, Perry, et al., 2020). Indeed, concerns have been raised that robots' immature social interaction abilities may interfere with children's social development norms, such as reciprocity and morality (Kahn et al., 2012b); thus, child–robot interaction needs to comply with human social norms (Zhao, 2006), and robots should act in accordance with children's social developmental characteristics. Despite the primacy of social norms, the extant studies have focused primarily on the use of robots as educational content providers, and relatively little attention has been paid to building social relationships between robots and children (Belpaeme, Kennedy, Ramachandran, Scassellati, & Tanaka, 2018). Meanwhile, the need for robots' sociality has been growing among its potential users.

The last few decades have witnessed an increase in households in which both parents work away from home (Goldberg, Prause, Lucas-Thompson, & Himsel, 2008; Youn, Leon, & Lee, 2012), which in turn increases their anxiousness that the reduced parenting time could hamper the emotional and cognitive development of their children (Heinrich, 2014; Hsin & Felfe, 2014). Consequently, many working parents are exploring parenting services that can help their offspring gain sufficient social experiences (Chaudry et al., 2011; Saraceno, 2011), and they also anticipate that social robots could interact with their children while providing childcare (Kwak, Jung, Shin, & Kim, 2008; Shiomi & Hagita, 2017). Therefore, the need for robotic interaction partners for children within homes is expected to grow in the near future (Kwak et al., 2008; Sharkey & Sharkey, 2010; Turkle, Taggart, & Dasté, 2006). Moreover, to fulfill working parents' desire to provide social experiences for their children, the designs of such robots will have to employ normative social principles in alignment with the children's social developmental stages.

The present study proposes politeness principles for social robots, so that they can provide a more social, enhanced interaction experience for children. Further, it examines the changes in the importance of robot etiquette depending on children's social developmental stages, as these involve different social characteristics as the children grow. In particular, it investigates children in dual-income families where parents are anxious about their appropriate social development. By targeting this specific group, exploring robots' polite behaviors that may increase children's perception of robots' sociality will identify a promising area of social robot use while providing a unique insight into ways of mitigating working parents' difficulty in childcare.

Section snippets

Social experience in interacting with social robots

The “computers are social actors” paradigm proposes that user experience of interacting with technology is inherently similar to that of human-to-human communication (Nass et al., 1994; Nass & Moon, 2000; Reeves & Nass, 1996). Users automatically perceive the social presence of machines (Lee, 2004) and show natural social responses (Nass & Moon, 2000). Previous studies have suggested ways of improving the interaction experience with robots via the strategic use of various social cues. For

Research model

The present study investigates behavioral principles for childcare social robots, and the research model is illustrated in Fig. 1. Grounded in the uses and gratifications theory (UGT), this model describes the process through which a robot's politeness can enhance children's sociality perception, thus forming a more positive evaluation. The model also hypothesizes the variance in robot etiquette according to the different developmental stages of children.

Data acquisition

The respondents in this study comprised working parents raising children aged 3–12 years. This study defined early childhood as 3- to 7-year-olds and middle childhood as 8- to 12-year-olds. The ages of the children were measured in the Korean style (one or two years older than the Western age), and the age groups of children were determined on the basis of the age at which children are admitted to elementary schools in South Korea, namely eight years (which corresponds to six to seven years by

Summary of results

The present study proposed and tested a process of children's robot evaluation formation through robots' politeness norm to improve their experience; this was done by optimizing the robots' behavioral principles depending on children's age groups. The results indicate that robots' polite behaviors can trigger children's sociality perception, thereby enhancing their evaluations of the robots. The findings on the influence of robot politeness are consistent with previous studies (Inbar & Meyer,

Conclusion

A robot that lives and communicates with humans is no longer an object of the distant future; it is already real, and its use will become exponentially higher in the near future (Weir, 2018). In particular, childcare robots for working parents can be a promising domain for social robots, as they actively explore parenting services to provide their children with sufficient social experience. To improve the social experience, this study proposed a politeness model in which robots could follow

Author cotribution

Jae-gil Lee: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Review & Editing. Jieon Lee: Investigation, Data curation, Writing – review & editing. Daeho Lee: Supervision, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Review & Editing.

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