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

Tomoki Miyamoto; Daisuke Katagami; Yuka Shigemitsu; Mayumi Usami; Takahiro Tanaka; Hitoshi Kanamori; Yuki Yoshihara; Kazuhiro Fujikake

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.526942

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

Front Psychol. 2021 Feb 24:12:526942. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.526942. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Tomoki Miyamoto¹, Daisuke Katagami^{1

2}, Yuka Shigemitsu², Mayumi Usami³, Takahiro Tanaka⁴, Hitoshi Kanamori⁴, Yuki Yoshihara⁴, Kazuhiro Fujikake⁵

Affiliations

¹ Graduate School of Tokyo Polytechnic University, Kanagawa, Japan.
² Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo Polytechnic University, Kanagawa, Japan.
³ National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo, Japan.
⁴ Institutes of Innovation for Future Society, Nagoya University, Aichi, Japan.
⁵ School of Psychology, Chukyo University, Aichi, Japan.

Abstract

In this study, we discuss the psychological acceptability of an utterance strategy used by the Driving Support Agent (DSA). Previous literature regarding DSA suggests that the adoption of a small robot as a form will increase acceptability. However, the agent's utterance has been reported as a problem faced by the user. Therefore, in this study, we designed the agent's utterance using politeness strategy as described by Brown and Levinson's famous sociolinguistics and pragmatics theory and analyzed its acceptability through a participant-based experiment. In this experiment, we used positive and negative politeness strategies (PPS and NPS, respectively). In general, PPS is utilized to reflect the desire to be liked/recognized by others, whereas NPS is utilized to reflect the need for not wanting to be disturbed by others. Based on our results, PPS was rated high compared to NPS (n = 197). Therefore, many participants highly evaluated PPS. However, there was a group of participants who appreciated NPS. There were also participants who evaluated the two strategies equally. The number of participants in these three groups was observed at 4:1:1. This result contributes as an index on the utterance design of the DSA.

Keywords: driving support agent; human-agent interaction; human-robot interaction; politeness theory; psychological acceptability; social distance; utterance design.