How to Tune your Draggin’: Can Body Language Mitigate Face Threat in Robotic Noncompliance?

Aidan Naughton and Tom Williams

Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Robotics

When social robots communicate moral norms, such as when rejecting inappropriate commands, humans expect them to do so with appropriate tact. Humans use a variety of strategies to carefully tune their harshness, including variations in phrasing and body language. In this work, we experimentally investigate how robots may similarly use variations in body language to complement changes in the phrasing of moral language.