Discrepancies between designs of robot communicative styles and their perceived assertiveness

A robot's perceived assertiveness can influence how people assess its credibility and their willingness to comply with its suggestions during human-robot interaction. This study proposes a novel measurement of the perceived assertiveness of a robot using both objective assessment of a person's compliance to a robot's suggestions in a math quiz task and subjective assessments of a person's perception and expectation of a robot in different hypothetical scenarios. The proposed measurement evaluates perceived assertiveness of a robot in three dimensions inspired by social behavioral studies on human-human interaction, namely social assertiveness, directiveness, and independence. We conducted an exploratory study using crowdsourcing to test the efficacy of this proposed measurement of perceived assertiveness. In particular, participants were exposed to robots that differed in terms of their anthropomorphism and their communicative styles. The communicative styles are designed following human studies of behaviors that are commonly associated with high or low assertiveness. Our results demonstrated the validity of the proposed measurement of perceived assertiveness. The observed discrepancy between the objective and subjective measurements highlights the necessity of evaluating human perception through multiple approaches. Moreover, gaps between intended and perceived robot assertiveness indicate a potential gap between human communication theories and their applicability to human-robot interaction.