Effect of Robot's Whispering Behavior on People's Motivation

This paper presents the effect of a robot’s whispering behavior on people’s motivation. Here, “whispering behavior” consists of a whispering cue and a small voice, which provides a natural sense of physical proximity in a context of confidentiality, thus increasing intimacy. A laboratory experiment was conducted to investigate this effect. In the experiment, a robot requested the participants to perform an annoying task that involved writing as many equations in a 9x9 multiplication table as possible. The result showed that the whispering cue improved task performance as measured by the number of written equations and writing time. The small voice, however, had no effect. Furthermore, to investigate the effectiveness of a robot’s whispering behavior on recommendations, we conducted a field trial in a shopping mall. The results showed the effectiveness of whispering on recommendations, suggesting that whispering behaviors are useful for various services that aim to build motivation, such as advertisements, sales promotions, and encouragement to study.