Does Sharing Negative Opinions About Others Foster Human-Robot Closeness? Exploring the Effects of Negative Utterances and the Ethics of Conversational Robots

Abstract

In recent years, there has been growing interest in developing dialogue robots capable of building close relationships with humans. Prior research in human interpersonal communication suggests that sharing negative opinions about others can play a critical role in fostering interpersonal closeness. Based on this insight, we developed a dialogue robot that shares negative opinions about third parties with users, and investigated whether such behavior would promote closeness in human-robot interaction. Contrary to our hypothesis, the results of a dialogue experiment revealed no significant effect of the robot's negative opinion sharing on relationship formation. We discuss a possible reason for this discrepancy: negative statements made by robots about others may be perceived as less ethically acceptable than when made by humans. These findings offer important insights for the design of dialogue robots aimed at fostering close relationships with users.