Vehicle Politeness in Driving Situations

Abstract

Future vehicles are becoming more like driving partners instead of mere machines. With the application of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs), vehicles perform driving tasks while drivers monitor the functioning states of vehicles. This change in interaction requires a deliberate consideration of how vehicles should present driving-related information. As a way of encouraging drivers to more readily accept instructions from vehicles, we suggest the use of social rules, such as politeness, in human-vehicle interaction. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment, we test the effects of vehicle politeness (plain vs. polite) on drivers’ interaction experiences in two operation situations (normal vs. failure). The results indicate that vehicle politeness improves interaction experience in normal working situations but impedes the experience in failure situations. Specifically, in normal situations, vehicles with polite instructions are highly evaluated for social presence, politeness, satisfaction and intention to use. Theoretical and practical implications on politeness research and speech interaction design are discussed.

Influence of Social Distance Expressed by Driving Support Agent’s Utterance on Psychological Acceptability

“…In recent years, with the goal of enabling a new kind of relationship between humans and cars, there is an increasing amount of research on D riving S upport A gent (DSA) (e.g., robot/virtual character) loaded in a car, which acts like a user’s partner ( Tanaka et al, 2018a , b ; Karatas et al, 2019 ; Lee et al, 2019 ; Miyamoto et al, 2019 ). These agents have intelligent utterance functions and support users by voice utterances, hand gestures, and facial gestures.…”

“…In studies related to human–agent and human–robot interactions, and topics that deal with artificial media that conduct social interaction with humans, politeness theory ( Brown and Levinson, 1987 ) is seen as an approach to design utterance that is easily accepted by users ( Salem et al, 2013 ; Torrey et al, 2013 ; Srinivasan and Takayama, 2016 ; Miyamoto et al, 2017 , 2019 ; Lee et al, 2019 ). Politeness theory is a well-known framework on conversation in the fields of pragmatics and sociolinguistics.…”

“…However, the general DSA behaves for a task as driving a car. In English and Korean language studies, the efforts to use PPS and NPS for task-oriented utterance design such as robots are attracting greater attention ( Salem et al, 2013 ; Torrey et al, 2013 ; Srinivasan and Takayama, 2016 ; Lee et al, 2019 ).…”

“… Lee et al (2019) designed a DSA’s utterance using politeness and verified the effect by conducting an experiment with a participant. According to their results, the implementation of polite utterance using NPS was found to be satisfactory.…”

Neurological Complications Resulting from Non-Oral Occupational Methanol Poisoning

“…However, recently there have been outbreaks of methanol poisoning via non-oral exposure at industrial sites in Korea (910). Besides, a hazard issue has been raised about methanol in automobile washer in Korea (11). We present in this study 3 patients who had severe neurological complications resulting from methanol poisoning via non-oral exposure in the electronics industry.…”