Two acts of social intelligence: the effects of mimicry and social praise on the evaluation of an artificial agent
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.
Published in 2011.