What a Pity, Pepper!

Abstract

We investigate the impact of warmth in robots' language on the perception of errors in a shopping assistance task (N=81) and found that error-free behavior was favored over erroneous if the dialogue is machine-like, while errors do not negatively impact liking, trust and acceptance if the robot uses human-like language. Warmth in robots' language thus seems to mitigate negative consequences and should be considered as a crucial design aspect.