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Effects of Referring to Robot vs. User Needs in Self-Explanations of Undesirable Robot Behavior

Autonomous or lively social robots will often exhibit behavior that is surprising to users and calls for explanation. However, it is not clear how such robot behavior should be explained best. Our previous work showed that different types of a robot's self-explanations, citing its actions, intentions, or needs - alone or in causal relations - have different effects on users (Stange & Kopp, 2020). Further analysis of the data from the cited study implies that explanations in terms of robot needs (e.g. for energy or social contact) did not adequately justify the robot's behavior. In this paper we study the effects of a robot citing the user's needs to explain its behavior. Our study is based on the assumption that users may feel more connected to a robot that aims to recognize and incorporate the users' needs in its decision-making, even when the resulting behavior turns out to be undesirable. Results show that explaining robot behavior with user needs generally did neither lead to higher gains in understanding or desirability of the behaviors, nor did it help to justify them better than explaining it with robot needs. Further, a robot referring to user needs was not perceived as more likable, trustworthy or mindful, nor were users' contact intentions increased. However, an in-depth analysis showed different effects of explanations for different behaviors. We discuss these differences in order to clarify which factors should inform content and form of a robot's behavioral self-explanations.