skip to main content
10.1145/3472306.3478336acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesivaConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Public Access

Effect of politeness strategies in dialogue on negotiation outcomes

Published: 14 September 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Negotiation is a social interaction aimed at reaching a mutually beneficial agreement among all participants in a conflict situation. Unfortunately, parties often find negotiations threatening or aversive, undermining the chances of reaching good agreements. Politeness strategies are means of communicating one's demands to a counterpart without threatening the counterpart's "face" by using tactical phrasing. Politeness strategies are classified into positive, negative, and off-record strategies depending on how they avoid face-threatening acts. In the present study, we investigated whether differences in the politeness strategies used by a virtual agent impact negotiated outcomes in a non-zero-sum situation. The participants (n=106) engaged in an online multi-issue negotiation with one of three agents (using the positive, off-record, or no politeness strategies, while the negative strategy was excluded because of validation failure). The results showed that the agents who used the off-record strategy were able to extract greater concessions from their human partners, whereas positive politeness, which does not threaten the other's face, led to fairer negotiated agreements. The human participants were comfortable exploiting agents who failed to adopt any politeness in their language. Politeness is a part of the toolbox that people use to manage the social rewards and punishments associated with all interactions, and our work highlights that agents can use this important social tool.

References

[1]
Tim Baarslag, Mark J. C. Hendrikx, Koen V. Hindriks, and Catholijn M. Jonker. 2015. Learning about the opponent in automated bilateral negotiation: a comprehensive survey of opponent modeling techniques. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 30, 5 (sep 2015), 849--898. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-015-9309-1
[2]
Tim Baarslag, Michael Kaisers, Enrico H. Gerding, Catholijn M. Jonker, and Jonathan Gratch. 2017. When Will Negotiation Agents Be Able to Represent Us? The Challenges and Opportunities for Autonomous Negotiators. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/653
[3]
Sandy Bogaert, Christophe Boone, and Carolyn Declerck. 2008. Social value orientation and cooperation in social dilemmas: A review and conceptual model. British Journal of Social Psychology 47, 3 (sep 2008), 453--480. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466607x244970
[4]
Stephen C. Brown, Penelope and Levinson. 1978. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
[5]
P J Carnevale and D G Pruitt. 1992. Negotiation and Mediation. Annual Review of Psychology 43, 1 (jan 1992), 531--582. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.43.020192.002531
[6]
Jacob Cohen. 1988. Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences 2nd Edition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[7]
Markus de Jong, Mariët Theune, and Dennis Hofs. 2008. Politeness and Alignment in Dialogues with a Virtual Guide. In Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1 (Estoril, Portugal) (AAMAS '08). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC, 207--214.
[8]
Celso M. de Melo, Peter Carnevale, and Jonathan Gratch. 2011. The Effect of Expression of Anger and Happiness in Computer Agents on Negotiations with Humans. In The 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 3 (Taipei, Taiwan) (AAMAS '11). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC, 937--944.
[9]
Celso M. de Melo, Stacy Marsella, and Jonathan Gratch. 2017. Social decisions and fairness change when people's interests are represented by autonomous agents. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 32, 1 (July 2017), 163--187. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-017-9376-6
[10]
David DeVault, Johnathan Mell, and Jonathan Gratch. 2015. Toward Natural Turn-Taking in a Virtual Human Negotiation Agent. In AAAI Spring Symposium 2015.
[11]
Isabel Ermida. 2006. Linguistic mechanisms of power in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Applying politeness theory to Orwell's world. Journal of Pragmatics 38, 6 (jun 2006), 842--862. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2005.05.008
[12]
Ernst Fehr and Klaus M. Schmidt. 2006. Chapter 8 The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism - Experimental Evidence and New Theories. In Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism and Reciprocity. Elsevier, 615--691. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1574-0714(06)01008-6
[13]
David Gill and Victoria Prowse. 2016. Cognitive Ability, Character Skills, and Learning to Play Equilibrium: A Level-kAnalysis. Journal of Political Economy 124, 6 (dec 2016), 1619--1676. https://doi.org/10.1086/688849
[14]
Erving Goffman. 1982. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Pantheon Books, New York.
[15]
Jonathan Gratch, David DeVault, Gale M. Lucas, and Stacy Marsella. 2015. Negotiation as a Challenge Problem for Virtual Humans. In Intelligent Virtual Agents. Springer International Publishing, 201--215. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21996-7_21
[16]
Herbert Paul Grice. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantics 3, 'Speech Acts'. Academic Press, New York, 41--58.
[17]
Swati Gupta, Marilyn A. Walker, and Daniela M. Romano. 2007. How Rude Are You? Evaluating Politeness and Affect in Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 203--217. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74889-2_19
[18]
Emmanuel Johnson and Jonathan Gratch. 2020. The Impact of Implicit Information Exchange in Human-agent Negotiations. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423895
[19]
Emmanuel Johnson, Sarah Roediger, Gale Lucas, and Jonathan Gratch. 2019. Assessing Common Errors Students Make When Negotiating. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308532.3329470
[20]
Paul A. M. Van Lange and Wim B. G. Liebrand. 1991. Social value orientation and intelligence: A test of the goal prescribes rationality principle. European Journal of Social Psychology 21, 4 (jul 1991), 273--292. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2420210402
[21]
Minha Lee, Gale Lucas, Johnathan Mell, Emmanuel Johnson, and Jonathan Gratch. 2019. What's on Your Virtual Mind?. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308532.3329465
[22]
Joanna Mania, Fieke Miedema, Rose Browne, Joost Broekens, and Catharine Oertel. 2020. Towards Understanding the Effect of Voice on Human-Agent Negotiation. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423896
[23]
Johnathan Mell and Jonathan Gratch. 2017. Grumpy & Pinocchio: Answering Human-Agent Negotiation Questions through Realistic Agent Design. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (São Paulo, Brazil) (AAMAS '17). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC, 401--409.
[24]
Johnathan Mell, Gale Lucas, and Jonathan Gratch. 2015. An Effective Conversation Tactic for Creating Value over Repeated Negotiations. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (Istanbul, Turkey) (AAMAS '15). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC, 1567--1576. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2772879.2773351
[25]
Tomoki Miyamoto, Daisuke Katagami, and Yuka Shigemitsu. 2017. Improving Relationships Based on Positive Politeness Between Humans and Life-Like Agents. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3125739.3132585
[26]
Tomoki Miyamoto, Daisuke Katagami, Yuka Shigemitsu, Mayumi Usami, Takahiro Tanaka, Hitoshi Kanamori, Yuki Yoshihara, and Kazuhiro Fujikake. 2021. Influence of Social Distance Expressed by Driving Support Agent's Utterance on Psychological Acceptability. Frontiers in Psychology 12 (feb 2021). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.526942
[27]
Ignacio Palacios-Huerta and Oscar Volij. 2009. Field Centipedes. American Economic Review 99, 4 (aug 2009), 1619--1635. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.99.4.1619
[28]
Steven Pinker. 2007. The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts. Intercultural Pragmatics 4, 4 (jan 2007). https://doi.org/10.1515/ip.2007.023
[29]
Pooja Prajod, Mohammed Al Owayyed, Tim Rietveld, Jaap-Jan van der Steeg, and Joost Broekens. 2019. The Effect of Virtual Agent Warmth on Human-Agent Negotiation. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (Montreal QC, Canada) (AAMAS '19). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC, 71--76.
[30]
Eugenio Proto, Aldo Rustichini, and Andis Sofianos. 2019. Intelligence, Personality, and Gains from Cooperation in Repeated Interactions. Journal of Political Economy 127, 3 (jun 2019), 1351--1390. https://doi.org/10.1086/701355
[31]
Sarah Roediger. 2018. The effect of suspicion on emotional influence tactics in virtual human negotiation. Master's thesis. University of Twente.
[32]
Sandrine Sorlin. 2017. The pragmatics of manipulation: Exploiting im/politeness theories. Journal of Pragmatics 121 (nov 2017), 132--146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.10.002
[33]
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
[34]
Hisashi Takagi and Kazunori Terada. 2021. The effect of anime character's facial expressions and eye blinking on donation behavior. Scientific Reports 11, 1 (apr 2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-87827-2
[35]
Kazunori Terada and Chikara Takeuchi. 2017. Emotional Expression in Simple Line Drawings of a Robot's Face Leads to Higher Offers in the Ultimatum Game. Frontiers in Psychology 8 (may 2017). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00724
[36]
Gerben A. van Kleef, Carsten K. W. De Dreu, and Antony S. R. Manstead. 2004. The interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86, 1 (2004), 57--76. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.86.1.57
[37]
Astrid M. Rosenthal von der Pütten, Carolin Straßmann, Ramin Yaghoubzadeh, Stefan Kopp, and Nicole C. Krämer. 2019. Dominant and submissive nonverbal behavior of virtual agents and its effects on evaluation and negotiation outcome in different age groups. Computers in Human Behavior 90 (jan 2019), 397--409. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.08.047
[38]
Ning Wang, W. Lewis Johnson, Richard E. Mayer, Paola Rizzo, Erin Shaw, and Heather Collins. 2008. The politeness effect: Pedagogical agents and learning outcomes. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 66, 2 (feb 2008), 98--112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.09.003
[39]
Sahba Zojaji, Christopher Peters, and Catherine Pelachaud. 2020. Influence of virtual agent politeness behaviors on how users join small conversational groups. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423917

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Cleaning Up Confounding: Accounting for Endogeneity Using Instrumental Variables and Two-Stage ModelsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367473033:8(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Join Me Here if You Will: Investigating Embodiment and Politeness Behaviors When Joining Small Groups of Humans, Robots, and Virtual CharactersProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642905(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024) Fuzzy Concession Strategy for Emotional Human-Computer Negotiation * 2024 IEEE 36th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI)10.1109/ICTAI62512.2024.00100(671-677)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Effect of politeness strategies in dialogue on negotiation outcomes

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    IVA '21: Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
    September 2021
    238 pages
    ISBN:9781450386197
    DOI:10.1145/3472306
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 14 September 2021

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. cooperation
    2. manipulation
    3. negotiation
    4. politeness

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Funding Sources

    Conference

    IVA '21
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 53 of 196 submissions, 27%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)587
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)67
    Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Cleaning Up Confounding: Accounting for Endogeneity Using Instrumental Variables and Two-Stage ModelsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367473033:8(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Join Me Here if You Will: Investigating Embodiment and Politeness Behaviors When Joining Small Groups of Humans, Robots, and Virtual CharactersProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642905(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024) Fuzzy Concession Strategy for Emotional Human-Computer Negotiation * 2024 IEEE 36th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI)10.1109/ICTAI62512.2024.00100(671-677)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
    • (2023)Investigating Politeness in the Prayers of Prophets: A Quranic Discourse PerspectiveJournal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies10.29333/ejecs/1744(112-135)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Impact of Multimodal Communication on Persuasiveness and Perceived Politeness of Virtual Agents in Small GroupsProceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3570945.3607356(1-8)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
    • (2023)Preference learning from emotional expressions contributes integrative solutions between human-AI negotiation2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW)10.1109/ACIIW59127.2023.10388197(1-7)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
    • (2023)The role of politeness in human–machine interactions: a systematic literature review and future perspectivesArtificial Intelligence Review10.1007/s10462-023-10540-156:Suppl 1(445-482)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023

    View Options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Login options

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media