Persuasive Social Robots using Reward/Coercion Strategies

In this paper, we present a user-study designed to examine the effect of reward/coercion persuasive strategies inspired by social power. We ran the study with 90 participants in a persuasion scenario in which they were asked to make a real choice to select a less-desirable option. The preliminary results indicated that the robot succeeded in persuading the users to select a less desirable choice compared to a better one. However, no difference was found in the perception of the robot regarding the persuasion strategies.