I'm sorry, Dave: i'm afraid i won't do that: social aspects of human-agent conflict

Authors:
Takayama,Leila
Groom,Victoria
Nass, Clifford

Summary:
People respond to the interacting system with the same rules and hueristics that applies to human. Negative politeness - politeness that would irritate the user in case of a disagreement. It need be negative experience if the system properly negotiates with the user.
Hypothesis: H1. People will change their decisions more often when the robot disagreed with them than when it always agreed with them, even with identical substantive content.
H2. People will feel more similar to (H2a) and more positively toward (H2b) the agreeing robot than the disagreeing one.
H3. A disagreeing voice coming from a separate control box will be more acceptable than a disagreeing voice that came from the robotic body (because of the effectiveness of linguistic distancing in politeness strategies among humans
User Study was then done with 40 users. A scenario was given to each user and were asked to make a choice. The robot would then comment on the choice. The user would then make a choice again. The manipulations done to the study were changing the degree agreement of robot with choices made by the user ( 0 - 60%) and changing the location of the robots voice( from body or separate box). The user's attitude change (likert scale feeback from user) and behavioral change of user ( change in choice) were measured. Users liked the robot when the voice was separated from it in case of disagreement and in case of agreement, the robot which had its own voice. All the hypothesis had a satisfactory results.

Discussion:
A media equation like paper. Can these principles be applied in tutoring applications? In a sketch tutoring application, the disagreements are so common. how to negotiate with users to make them understand the mistakes? How to make such negotiations effective without voice just with text based feedback?