Influence of virtual agent politeness behaviors on how users join small conversational groups

Sahba Zojaji, Christopher E. Peters, Catherine Pelachaud

Abstract: Politeness behaviors could affect individuals' decisions heavily in their daily lives and may therefore also play an important role in human-agent interactions. This study considers the impact of politeness behaviors made by a virtual agent, already in a small face-to-face conversational group with another agent, on a human participant as they approach to join it in a virtual environment displayed on a monitor. The agent uses five verbal and nonverbal politeness strategies, ranging from indirect and implicit to direct and explicit, in an attempt to influence the participant to join the group at an inconvenient location, which requires more time and effort than a direct route that would ignore the invitation of the agent. In addition to assessing the success of the strategies at influencing participant behavior, the participants' perception of the agent's persuasive behavior is assessed in relation to clarity, face loss, positive face, and negative face. Based on results from a within-subjects experiment with 30 participants, we found that more direct and explicit politeness strategies have a higher level of success when requesting a participant to join a small group at an inconvenient location, but sometimes negatively impact their perception of the agent. A positive politeness strategy was found to be the most effective for both persuasive success and maintaining a positive impression of the agent.