The role of politeness in human–machine interactions: a systematic literature review and future perspectives

Abstract

The growing prevalence of interactions between humans and machines, coupled with the rapid development of intelligent and human-like features in technology, necessitates considering the potential implications that an increasingly inter-personal interaction style might have on human behavior. Particularly, since human–human interactions are fundamentally affected by politeness rules, several researchers are investigating if such social norms have some implications also within human–machine interactions. This paper reviews scientific works dealing with politeness issues within human–machine interactions by considering a variety of artificial intelligence systems, such as smart devices, robots, digital assistants, and self-driving cars. This paper aims to analyze scientific results to answer the questions of why technological devices should behave politely toward humans, but above all, why human beings should be polite toward a technological device. As a result of the analysis, this paper wants to outline future research directions for the design of more effective, socially competent, acceptable, and trustworthy intelligent systems.

Should robots be polite? Expectations about politeness in human–robot interaction

“…Since our potential users already expect this type of politeness strategy, we believe that it could facilitate interaction by making the robot culturally adapted but task-oriented. This partly contradicts Ribino (2023) ’s suggestion that machines should generally be more adaptive to the user when it comes to politeness. Our results suggest that adapting a robot’s politeness behavior to the user may only be necessary in a private setting, and not in a public one.…”

“…The relevance of politeness for HRI has already been established in numerous studies concerned with politeness in HRI in different ways ( Ribino, 2023 ), some of which are presented in the following.…”

“…There is also a lot of research on how humans use language with machines, especially in terms of politeness ( Ribino, 2023 ). Some studies have shown that users are polite to machines ( Nass et al, 1999 ) and embodied conversational agents ( Hoffmann et al, 2009 ), for example, while evaluating an agent.…”

An Overview of Approaches and Methods for the Cognitive Workload Estimation in Human–Machine Interaction Scenarios through Wearables Sensors

“…Furthermore, the development of flexible, stretchable, and miniaturized wearable sensors has shown great potential for personalized healthcare applications, including the monitoring of motion, physiological, electrophysiological, and electrochemical signals [29]. These advancements in wearable sensor technology have paved the way for applications in healthcare monitoring, disease diagnostics, and HMI [30][31][32][33]. Overall, wearable sensors have the potential to play a transformative role in healthcare and ergonomics, offering continuous, non-invasive monitoring of physiological signals of individuals [31,34].…”

Modeling Politeness in Human-Robot Interaction

“…Despite critique, especially regarding claims about its universality [2], Brown and Levinson's [3] politeness theory is still often used as a basis for politeness modeling and implementations, also in human-robot interaction research [23].…”