Abstract
Social influence plays a crucial role in persuasive technology, significantly impacting behaviors through social relationships. This influence extends beyond human interactions to human-robot interactions, where persuasive social robots can effectively engage users. This study explores a novel persuasion strategy for social robots, focusing on Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention (CRNI). This approach leverages children’s reluctance to inconvenience others to regulate behaviors, such as improving posture during handwriting activities.
The CRNI model hypothesizes that relational norms between children and robots can motivate behavior change. When improper behavior, like poor posture, is detected, the system generates an aversive stimulus against the robot, prompting the robot to complain and indirectly ask the child to correct their behavior. This method creates an artificial causal relationship between the child’s behavior and the robot’s disturbance, fostering self-regulation through empathy.
To investigate the CRNI approach, we applied it to handwriting posture regulation, addressing the prevalent issue of poor posture in children during writing tasks. The study involved participatory design workshops with 12 children and one teacher from a primary school. The workshops aimed to identify effective disturbances against robot peers and compare them to those suggested for human peers. The children’s designs highlighted disturbances that were effective and empathetic, such as “erasing the writing,” which emerged as a preferred disturbance.
The study found that children perceive the robot as a social entity, enhancing the persuasive power of the CRNI model. The results suggest that leveraging social norms and empathy towards robots can regulate children’s behaviors effectively. Future research will focus on real-world applications of the CRNI model, examining its long-term efficacy and potential for habit formation in children’s handwriting posture.
Reference:
https://arxiv.org/html/2406.07721v1