Indirect Politeness of Disconfirming Answers to Humans and Robots

Politeness is a social and linguistic phenomenon that humans use in communication to build and maintain relationships and spare others’ feelings. Research on whether humans also apply politeness strategies when interacting with robots – artifacts that lack feelings – yields contradictory findings. This paper presents a human–robot interaction study (N=40) and compares participants’ use of face saving politeness strategies in their responses to disconfirmation eliciting and face-threatening questions asked either by a robot or a human. An analysis of the linguistic properties of participants’ answers (response type, use of politeness markers) shows a higher use of indirect politeness in disconfirming answers directed at humans than at robots. This contradicts previous theories on the automatic and ‘mindless’ application of social strategies towards artificial agents. Alternative explanations for the differences in politeness behavior are discussed.