A Systematic Review of Experimental Work on Persuasive Social Robots

There is a growing body of work reporting on experimental work on social robotics (SR) used for persuasive purposes. We report a comprehensive review on persuasive social robotics research with the aim to better inform their design, by summarizing literature on factors impacting their persuasiveness. From 54 papers, we extracted the SR’s design features evaluated in the studies and the evidence of their efficacy. We identified five main categories in the factors that were evaluated: modality, interaction, social character, context and persuasive strategies. Our literature review finds generally consistent effects for factors in modality, interaction and context, whereas more mixed results were shown for social character and persuasive strategies. This review further summarizes findings on interaction effects of multiple factors for the persuasiveness of social robots. Finally, based on the analysis of the papers reviewed, suggestions for factor expression design and evaluation, and the potential for using qualitative methods and more longer-term studies are discussed.