“Is this all you can do? Harder!”: The Effects of (Im)Polite Robot Encouragement on Exercise Effort

Most social robot behaviors in human-robot interaction are designed to be polite, but there is little research about how or when a robot could be impolite, and if that may ever be beneficial. We explore the potential benefits and tradeoffs of different politeness levels for human-robot interaction in an exercise context. We designed impolite and polite phrases for a robot exercise trainer and conducted a 24-person experiment where people squat in front of the robot as it uses (im)polite phrases to encourage them. We found participants exercised harder and felt competitive with the impolite robot, while the polite robot was found to be friendly, but sometimes uncompelling and disingenuous. Our work provides evidence that human-robot interaction should continue to aim for more nuanced and complex models of communication.