Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

The Influence of Politeness Behavior on User Compliance with Social Robots in a Healthcare Service Setting

  • Published:
International Journal of Social Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Particularly in the healthcare service domain, social robots are expected to be good assistants, advisers, or practitioners. To increase the effectiveness of healthcare services provided by social robots, patients must comply with their requests. Research is plentiful on what makes patients comply with healthcare advice. In this paper, which is based on Bulgurcu’s study of rationality-based beliefs, command-compliance theory, and social exchange theory, we propose a research model of compliance during interaction with social robots, examining beliefs about and overall assessments of the consequences of complying with robot requests and extending the findings of previous studies to the setting of healthcare services. We specifically investigate the perceived level of politeness in robots’ speech and gestures as a determinant of compliance intention. Using a social robot, NAO, as a provider of healthcare services, we conducted an experiment. The results suggest that the aforementioned theories are useful in understanding user behaviors toward social robots in a healthcare service setting. Interestingly, and unlike in other settings, the perceived level of politeness of a social robot in a healthcare service setting negatively affects the perceived benefit of compliance, and, hence, intention to comply. A lower politeness level is closer to a command or strong recommendation than a suggestion or causal recommendation, which is common in shopping, tourism, or convention settings. The findings of this study imply that polite behavior from a social robot is an important factor in the compliance of healthcare service users. Direct speech with polite gestures is the most effective way to increase patient compliance in with healthcare advice provided by social robots in healthcare settings. However, higher levels of politeness do not always increase patients’ intention to comply.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Ajzen I (1991) The theory of planned behavior. Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 50(2):179–211

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Alshurafa N, Eastwood J-A, Nyamathi S, Liu JJ, Xu W, Ghasemzadeh H, Pourhomayoun M, Sarrafzadeh M (2015) Improving compliance in remote healthcare systems through smartphone battery optimization. IEEE J Biomed Health Inform 19(1):57–63

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Andrist S, Mutlu B, Tapus A (2015) Look like me: matching robot personality via gaze to increase motivation. In: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems, 2015. ACM, pp 3603–3612

  4. Bainbridge WA, Hart J, Kim ES, Scassellati B (2008) The effect of presence on human-robot interaction. In: The 17th IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication, 2008. RO-MAN 2008. IEEE, pp 701–706

  5. Belfiore PJ, Basile SP, Lee DL (2008) Using a high probability command sequence to increase classroom compliance: the role of behavioral momentum. J Behav Educ 17(2):160–171

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Benotti L, Blackburn P (2016) Polite interactions with robots. What Social robots can and should do: proceedings of robophilosophy 2016/TRANSOR 2016 290:293

  7. Bethel CL, Stevenson MR, Scassellati B (2011) Secret-sharing: interactions between a child, robot, and adult. In: 2011 IEEE international conference on systems, man, and cybernetics (SMC), 2011. IEEE, pp 2489–2494

  8. Bickmore T, Mauer D, Crespo F, Brown T (2007) Persuasion, task interruption and health regimen adherence. In: International conference on persuasive technology, 2007. Springer, pp 1–11

  9. Breazeal C, Kidd CD, Thomaz AL, Hoffman G, Berlin M (2005) Effects of nonverbal communication on efficiency and robustness in human–robot teamwork. In: 2005 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems, 2005 (IROS 2005), 2005. IEEE, pp 708–713

  10. Brown P, Levinson SC (1978) Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena. In: Questions and politeness: strategies in social interaction. Cambridge University Press, pp 56–311

  11. Brown R, Gilman A (1960) The pronouns of power and solidarity. In: Sebeok TA (ed) Style in language. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 253–76

    Google Scholar 

  12. Bulgurcu B, Cavusoglu H, Benbasat I (2010) Information security policy compliance: an empirical study of rationality-based beliefs and information security awareness. MIS Q 34(3):523–548

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Burgoon M, Burgoon J (1990) Compliance-gaining and health care. Seeking compliance: the production of interpersonal influence messages, pp 161–188

  14. Cabibihan J-J, Javed H, Ang M, Aljunied SM (2013) Why robots? A survey on the roles and benefits of social robots in the therapy of children with autism. Int J Soc Robot 5(4):593–618

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Chadwick-Jones JK (1976) Social exchange theory: its structure and influence in social psychology, vol 8. Academic Press, London

    Google Scholar 

  16. Chubon R (1988) Significant compliance events from my 33 years of personal experience with severe disability. J Compliance Health Care 3:9–21

    Google Scholar 

  17. Clark HH, Schunk DH (1980) Polite responses to polite requests. Cognition 8(2):111–143

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Costa S, Soares F, Santos C, Ferreira MJ, Moreira F, Pereira AP, Cunha F (2011) An approach to promote social and communication behaviors in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Robot based intervention. In: RO-MAN, 2011 IEEE, 2011. IEEE, pp 101–106

  19. Coulter KS, Coulter RA (2002) Determinants of trust in a service provider: the moderating role of length of relationship. J Serv Mark 16(1):35–50

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Cramer JA, Roy A, Burrell A, Fairchild CJ, Fuldeore MJ, Ollendorf DA, Wong PK (2008) Medication compliance and persistence: terminology and definitions. Value Health 11(1):44–47

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Cropanzano R, Mitchell MS (2005) Social exchange theory: an interdisciplinary review. J Manag 31(6):874–900

    Google Scholar 

  22. D’Mello S, Olney A, Williams C, Hays P (2012) Gaze tutor: a gaze-reactive intelligent tutoring system. Int J Hum Comput Stud 70(5):377–398

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Dautenhahn K, Werry I, Salter T, Boekhorst RT (2003) Towards adaptive autonomous robots in autism therapy: varieties of interactions. In: Computational intelligence in robotics and automation, 2003. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE international symposium on, 2003. IEEE, pp 577–582

  24. Fasola J, Mataric M (2013) A socially assistive robot exercise coach for the elderly. J Hum Robot Interact 2(2):3–32

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Gagné M, Deci EL (2005) Self-determination theory and work motivation. J Organ Behav 26(4):331–362

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Guéguen N, Joule RV, Halimi-Falkowicz S, Pascual A, Fischer-Lokou J, Dufourcq-Brana M (2013) I’m free but I’ll comply with your request: generalization and multidimensional effects of the “evoking freedom” technique. J Appl Soc Psychol 43(1):116–137

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Hanson RW (1986) Physician–patient communication and compliance. Compliance: the dilemma of the chronically ill, pp 182–212

  28. Haynes RB, Taylor DW, Sackett DL (eds) (1979) Compliance in health care. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

    Google Scholar 

  29. Hersh K, Borum R (1998) Command hallucinations, compliance, and risk assessment. J Am Acad Psychiatry Law Online 26(3):353–359

    Google Scholar 

  30. Hiroi Y, Ito A (2011) Influence of the size factor of a mobile robot moving toward a human on subjective acceptable distance. INTECH Open Access Publisher, Rijeka

    Book  Google Scholar 

  31. Horwitz RI, Horwitz SM (1993) Adherence to treatment and health outcomes. Arch Intern Med 153(16):1863–1868

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Huang C-M, Mutlu B (2012) Robot behavior toolkit: generating effective social behaviors for robots. In: Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, 2012. ACM, pp 25–32

  33. Ide S (1990) How and why do women speak more politely in Japanese. Aspects of Japanese women’s language, pp 63–79

  34. Junginger J (1990) Predicting compliance with command hallucinations. Am J Psychiatry 147(2):245–247

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Kahn PH Jr, Kanda T, Ishiguro H, Freier NG, Severson RL, Gill BT, Ruckert JH, Shen S (2012) “Robovie, you’ll have to go into the closet now”: children’s social and moral relationships with a humanoid robot. Dev Psychol 48(2):303

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Kim DH, MacDonald B, McDaid A, Kawamura S, Kim H, Bean ET, Fraser F, Broadbent E (2016) User perceptions of soft robot arms and fingers for healthcare. In: Robot and human interactive communication (RO-MAN), 2016 25th IEEE international symposium on, 2016. IEEE, pp 1150–1155

  37. Kennedy J, Baxter P, Belpaeme T (2014) Children comply with a robot’s indirect requests. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, 2014. ACM, pp 198–199

  38. Kidd CD, Taggart W, Turkle S (2006) A sociable robot to encourage social interaction among the elderly. In: Robotics and automation, 2006. ICRA 2006. Proceedings 2006 IEEE international conference on, 2006. IEEE, pp 3972–3976

  39. Kim EJ, Lee SY, Cui M, Kwon O (2015) Factors affecting compliance with social robots in a hospital setting. In: Proceedings 2015 international conference on platform technology and service (PlatCon 2015), 2015. IEEE

  40. Kim KJ, Park E, Sundar SS (2013) Caregiving role in human–robot interaction: a study of the mediating effects of perceived benefit and social presence. Comput Hum Behav 29(4):1799–1806

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Kim M-S, Sur J, Gong L (2009) Humans and humanoid social robots in communication contexts. AI Soc 24(4):317–325

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Koay KL, Syrdal DS, Walters ML, Dautenhahn K (2007) Living with robots: investigating the habituation effect in participants’ preferences during a longitudinal human–robot interaction study. In: Robot and human interactive communication, 2007. RO-MAN 2007. The 16th IEEE international symposium on, 2007. IEEE, pp 564–569

  43. Krasnegor NA, Epstein L, Johnson SB, Yaffe SJ, Epstein LH (2013) Developmental aspects of health compliance behavior. Psychology Press, Hove

    Google Scholar 

  44. Kwon O, Choi S (2009) Context-aware selection of politeness level for polite mobile service in Korea. Expert Syst Appl 36(3):4198–4206

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Lee JH, Nolan RE (1998) The relationship between mentoring and the career advancement of women administrators in cooperative extension. J Career Dev 25(1):3–13

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Lee MK, Forlizzi J, Kiesler S, Rybski P, Antanitis J, Savetsila S Personalization in HRI: a longitudinal field experiment. In: Human–robot interaction (HRI), 2012 7th ACM/IEEE international conference on, 2012. IEEE, pp 319–326

  47. Lee YC (2006) An empirical investigation into factors influencing the adoption of an e-learning system. Online Inf Rev 30(5):517–541

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Li S, Wrede B, Sagerer G (2006) A dialog system for comparative user studies on robot verbal behavior. In: Robot and human interactive communication, 2006. ROMAN 2006. The 15th IEEE international symposium on, 2006. IEEE, pp 129–134

  49. Lin T (2012) A comparative study of perceived politeness in Chinese and Japanese verbal communication. Intercult Commun Stud 21(2):151–165

    Google Scholar 

  50. Lisetti CL, Brown SM, Alvarez K, Marpaung AH (2004) A social informatics approach to human–robot interaction with a service social robot. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern C 34(2):195–209

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Looi QE, See SL (2012) Applying politeness maxims in social robotics polite dialogue. In: Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, 2012. ACM, pp 189–190

  52. Makatchev M, Lee MK, Simmons R (2009) Relating initial turns of human–robot dialogues to discourse. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on human robot interaction, San Diego, United States, pp 321–322

  53. Mann JA, MacDonald BA, Kuo IH, Li X, Broadbent E (2015) People respond better to robots than computer tablets delivering healthcare instructions. Comput Hum Behav 43:112–117. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.029

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Meyer J, Miller C, Hancock P, de Visser EJ, Dorneich M (2016) Politeness in machine–human and human–human interaction. In: Proceedings of the human factors and ergonomics society annual meeting, 2016, vol 1. SAGE Publications Sage CA, Los Angeles, CA, pp 279–283

  55. Miller CA, Wu P, Ott T (2012) Politeness in teams: implications for directive compliance behavior and associated attitudes. J Cogn Eng Decis Mak 6(2):214–242

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Nelson HJ (2013) The effects of intervention involving a robot on compliance of four children with autism to requests produced by their mothers. Dissertation, McKay School of Education

  57. O’Hair D, Cody MJ (1987) Machiavellian beliefs and social influence. West J Speech Commun 51:279–303

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Parmiggiani A, Randazzo M, Maggiali M, Metta G, Elisei F, Bailly G (2015) Design and validation of a talking face for the iCub. Int J Hum Robot 12(3):1550026

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. Podsakoff PM, MacKenzie SB, Lee JY, Podsakoff NP (2003) Common method biases in behavioral research: a critical review of the literature and recommended remedies. J Appl Psychol 88(5):879–903

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. Prizant BM, Wetherby AM, Rubin E, Laurent AC (2003) The SCERTS Model: a transactional, family-centered approach to enhancing communication and socioemotional abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder. Infant Young Child 16(4):296–316

    Article  Google Scholar 

  61. Pronin E (2007) Perception and misperception of bias in human judgment. Trends Cogn Sci 11(1):37–43

    Article  Google Scholar 

  62. Roberts MW, McMahon RJ, Forehand R, Humphreys L (1978) The effect of parental instruction-giving on child compliance. Behav Ther 9(5):793–798

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. Robins B, Dautenhahn K, Dickerson P (2009) From isolation to communication: a case study evaluation of robot assisted play for children with autism with a minimally expressive humanoid robot. In: Advances in computer–human interactions, 2009. ACHI’09. Second international conferences on, Cancun, Mexico, pp 205–211. doi:10.1109/ACHI.2009.32

  64. Ruckert JH, Kahn PH Jr, Kanda T et al (2013) Designing for sociality in HRI by means of multiple personas in robots. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, Tokyo, Japan, pp 217–218

  65. Salem M, Ziadee M, Sakr M (2013) Effects of politeness and interaction context on perception and experience of HRI. In: Social robotics. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 531–541

  66. Salem M, Ziadee M, Sakr M (2014) Marhaba, how may I help you? Effects of politeness and culture on robot acceptance and anthropomorphization. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, Bielefeld, Germany, pp 74–81

  67. Shahid S, Krahmer E, Swerts M (2014) Child-robot interaction across cultures: how does playing a game with a social robot compare to playing a game alone or with a friend? Comput Hum Behav 40:86–100

    Article  Google Scholar 

  68. Shinozawa K, Naya F, Yamato J, Kogure K (2005) Differences in effect of robot and screen agent recommendations on human decision-making. Int J Hum Comput Stud 62(2):267–279

    Article  Google Scholar 

  69. Shirado T, Isahara H (2001) Numerical model of the strategy for choosing polite expressions. In: Computational linguistics and intelligent text processing, Mexico-City, Mexico, pp 98–109

  70. Sinha PK, Nanda RS, McNeil DW (1996) Perceived orthodontist behaviors that predict patient satisfaction, orthodontist–patient relationship, and patient adherence in orthodontic treatment. Am J Orthod Dentofac Orthop 110(4):370–377

    Article  Google Scholar 

  71. Smith VA, DeVellis BM, Kalet A, Roberts JC, DeVellis RF (2005) Encouraging patient adherence: primary care physicians’ use of verbal compliance-gaining strategies in medical interviews. Patient Educ Couns 57(1):62–76

    Article  Google Scholar 

  72. Srinivasan V, Takayama L (2016) Help me please: robot politeness strategies for soliciting help from humans. In: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2016. ACM, pp 4945–4955

  73. Stewart MA (1995) Effective physician–patient communication and health outcomes: a review. CMAJ 152(9):1423

    Google Scholar 

  74. Street RL Jr, Wiemann JM (1987) Patient satisfaction with physicians’ interpersonal involvement, expressiveness, and dominance. Ann Int Commun Assoc 10(1):591–612

    Google Scholar 

  75. Thompson CL, Pledger LM (1993) Doctor-patient communication: is patient knowledge of medical terminology improving? Health Commun 5:89–97

    Article  Google Scholar 

  76. Torrey C, Fussell S, Kiesler S (2013) How a robot should give advice. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, 2013. IEEE, pp 275–282

  77. Whitworth B (2005) Polite computing. Behav Inf Technol 24(5):353–363

    Article  Google Scholar 

  78. Whitworth B, Liu T (2008) Politeness as a social computing requirement. Handbook of conversation design for instructional applications, pp 419–436

  79. Will KE, Geller ES (2004) Increasing the safety of children’s vehicle travel: from effective risk communication to behavior change. J Saf Res 35(3):263–274

    Article  Google Scholar 

  80. Wong KK-K (2013) Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) techniques using SmartPLS. Mark Bull 24(1):1–32

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  81. Zaga C, De Vries RA, Spenkelink SJ, Truong KP, Evers V (2016) Help-giving robot behaviors in child-robot games: exploring semantic free utterances. In: The Eleventh ACM/IEEE international conference on human robot interaction, 2016. IEEE Press, pp 541–542

  82. Zhu B, Kaber D (2012) Effects of etiquette strategy on human–robot interaction in a simulated medicine delivery task. Intell Serv Robot 5(3):199–210

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Strategic R&D Program for Industrial Technology (10041659) and funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy (MOTIE).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sungkyul University, Anyang, Kyunggi-do, Republic of Korea

    Namyeon Lee

  2. Kyung Hee University, Hoegi-dong, Dondaemun-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Jeonghun Kim, Eunji Kim & Ohbyung Kwon

Authors
  1. Namyeon Lee
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jeonghun Kim
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Eunji Kim
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Ohbyung Kwon
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ohbyung Kwon.

Appendices

Appendix A

See Table 9.

Table 9 Constructs and items
Full size table

Appendix B

See Table 10.

Table 10 Results of exploratory factor analysis
Full size table

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lee, N., Kim, J., Kim, E. et al. The Influence of Politeness Behavior on User Compliance with Social Robots in a Healthcare Service Setting. Int J of Soc Robotics 9, 727–743 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0420-0

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0420-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation