Politeness behaviors could affect individuals' decisions heavily in their daily lives and may therefore also play an important role in human-agent interactions. This study considers the impact of politeness behaviors made by a virtual agent, already in a small face-to-face conversational group with another agent, on a human participant as they approach to join it in a virtual environment displayed on a monitor. The agent uses five verbal and nonverbal politeness strategies, ranging from indirect and implicit to direct and explicit, in an attempt to influence the participant to join the group at an inconvenient location, which requires more time and effort than a direct route that would ignore the invitation of the agent. In addition to assessing the success of the strategies at influencing participant behavior, the participants' perception of the agent's persuasive behavior is assessed in relation to clarity, face loss, positive face, and negative face. Based on results from a within-subjects experiment with 30 participants, we found that more direct and explicit politeness strategies have a higher level of success when requesting a participant to join a small group at an inconvenient location, but sometimes negatively impact their perception of the agent. A positive politeness strategy was found to be the most effective for both persuasive success and maintaining a positive impression of the agent. ; QC 20210325


    Access

    Download


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Influence of virtual agent politeness behaviors on how users join small conversational groups


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2020-01-01



    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629




    Influence of Conversational Contents on Driving Behaviors

    Asao, T. / Ishimura, J. / Wada, T. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2003


    Influence of conversational contents on driving behaviors

    Asao, T. / Ishimura, J. / Wada, T. et al. | IEEE | 2003


    A dataset of human and robot approach behaviors into small free-standing conversational groups

    Yang, Fangkai / Gao, Alex Yuan / Ma, Ruiyang et al. | BASE | 2021

    Free access

    Context Sensitive Conversational Agent Using DNN

    Karve, Shreya / Nagmal, Arati / Papalkar, Sahil et al. | IEEE | 2018