A cross-cultural study of the receptivity of interactive life-like agents to linguistic considerations in six countries

Abstract

According to Brown et al. there are two basic human needs: the need for self-determination and the need to evaluate others, and language strategies based on these needs. They call them "negative politeness strategy (NPS)" and "positive politeness strategy (PPS)," respectively. The degree of face violation by a certain speech act is determined by "Distance", "Power" and "Rank of impositions". In other words, it is possible that a linguistic strategy appropriately selected in one culture may result in speech with low affinity in another culture, including differences in attitudes toward AI and anthropomorphic systems. In this study, we report the results of a survey conducted in six countries (Japan, the USA, China, France, the UK, and Australia) on the effects of linguistic considerations.