2011 Volume 13 Issue 1 Pages 31-40
The paper presents a persuasion effect of a robot's whispering behavior that consists of a whispering gesture and small voice. Whispering behavior naturally provides physical proximity and the context of confidential talks that increase intimacy with each other. We have conducted a between-subject experiment to investigate the persuasion effects of whispering gesture and small voice. In the experiment, a robot requested an annoying task, which is a writing as many multiplication table equations as possible. The result shows that whispering gesture significantly increased the number of equations and writing time, meanwhile, small voice had no effect for them. The reason might be that we used simply small voice (voiced speech) not but breathed speech. We believe that whispering behavior is useful for various services that require persuasion effects, such as advertisements, sales promotions, encouragement to study and so on.
