Politeness cannot make up for robots’ errors
Shikhar Kumar, Eliran Itzhak, Noam Tractinsky, Galit Nimrod, Vardit Sarne-Fleischmann, Yael Edan · 2026
Read Politeness cannot make up for robots’ errors by Shikhar Kumar, Eliran Itzhak, Noam Tractinsky, Galit Nimrod, Vardit Sarne-Fleischmann, Yael Edan (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13318723.txt.
Description
Shikhar Kumar and colleagues report a 2026 pair of user studies on robot politeness and mistakes. They asked whether polite behaviour can offset error-prone performance. Two non-humanoid robots were tested: a mobile robot and a manipulator arm. Participants were 59 young adults with engineering backgrounds, aged 24 to 28.
Politeness followed a classic three-rule scheme, present or absent. Correctness was varied by adding deliberate errors or none. Correct and polite robots earned the best ratings overall. Crucially, politeness never made up for errors. A correct but strict robot beat a polite but mistaken one. The polite, error-prone robot could even frustrate users more. The authors stress testing across robot types and tasks.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Shikhar Kumar, Eliran Itzhak, Noam Tractinsky, Galit Nimrod, Vardit Sarne-Fleischmann, Yael Edan |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 87649 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |