Two acts of social intelligence: the effects of mimicry and social praise on the evaluation of an artificial agent

2010/12/08 by Maurits Kaptein, Panos Markopoulos, Boris de Ruyter +1
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Action Observation and Synchronization #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Social Robot Interaction and HRI

paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s00146-010-0304-4

openalex publication_date 2010/12/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

This paper describes a study of the effects of two acts of social intelligence, namely mimicry and social praise, when used by an artificial social agent. An experiment ( N = 50) is described which shows that social praise—positive feedback about the ongoing conversation—increases the perceived friendliness of a chat-robot. Mimicry—displaying matching behavior—enhances the perceived intelligence of the robot. We advice designers to incorporate both mimicry and social praise when their system needs to function as a social actor. Different ways of implementing mimicry and praise by artificial social actors in an ambient persuasive scenario are discussed.

Citations

• The Science of Persuasion
• Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers
• A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains
• Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change.

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