Effects of communication style and culture on ability to accept recommendations from robots

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effects of communication styles and culture on people’s accepting recommendations from robots. The goal was to provide insight for culturally adaptive robot design. The independent variables were communication style (i.e. implicit or explicit), the participants’ cultural background (i.e. Chinese or German), and the robot’s language (i.e. native language and English for Chinese and German subjects). A laboratory experiment was conducted with 16 Chinese and 16 German college students. Basic descriptive statistics and t-test are used for biographical information analysis; reliability test is used for questionnaire; MANOVA and non-parametric test are used for testing the hypotheses. The results showed that the Chinese participants preferred an implicit communication style than German participants. Chinese participants evaluated the robots as being more likable, trustworthy, and credible, and were more likely to accept the implicit recommendations. The German participants evaluated the robots as being less likable, trustworthy, and credible, and were less inclined to accept implicit recommendations.