Increasing Accountability and Compliance with Robot Advice

Service robots on organizational frontlines, notably in health and elderly care settings, promise to tackle staff shortages. In such service contexts, compliance is crucial for consumer well-being, but compliance with robot advice remains problematically low. This research explores how the source of robot advice affects compliance in human–robot interactions. In six studies, including four field studies with real human–robot interactions, the authors demonstrate that consumers are more likely to comply with advice given by a robot service provider when the source of advice is a human rather than the robot itself. This is because a human source of robot advice increases the feeling of accountability, or the expectation that one might need to justify one's actions to others, which is more difficult to achieve with only robot social presence. In turn, this fosters advice adherence, which also persists over time across repeated interactions. However, when the robot embeds social cues in the advice, the difference in accountability and compliance between robot-only and robot advice with a human source attenuates. These insights hold enormous promise, especially for health care practitioners, institutions, and consumers for whom increased compliance can lead to better health outcomes, reduced hospital readmissions, improved recovery, and elevated well-being.