Bon Appetit! Robot Persuasion for Food Recommendation

Abstract

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.