A Storytelling Robot managing Persuasive and Ethical Stances via ACT-R: an Exploratory Study

In the last decade, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has started to focus its attention on the design and implementation of artificial systems "orienting" attitudes and/or behaviours of a user according to a predefined direction. This growing sub-field, studying the so-called Persuasive Technologies, concerns a variety of system typologies that can adopt different strategies to pursue their goals. Building persuasive robots able to interact with human beings on a specific topic (or in a multi-domain setting) in a realistic and persuasive way, represents an open problem and research challenge in Social Robotics. To this aim, a strategy often used in human-human communication to make people reconsider their behaviour and beliefs, and similarly proposed in human-robot interaction, is to exploit storytelling to let people identify themselves with the characters or roles in a story in order to understand different perspectives and needs. In the design of a persuasive system, in addition, it is also important to not ignore the ethical dimension: i.e. an intelligent artificial system should be able to make decision and act in an ethical way, taking into account norms of social practices and needs of other individuals.