The Double-Edged Effect of Heightened Robot Attentiveness on Recommendation Acceptance

We conceptualize heightened robot attentiveness as a motive-ambiguous social cue: the same attentive behavior may signal genuine concern for customers while also suggesting an attempt to influence their choices. Adopting an attributional perspective, we integrate insights from social cognition and persuasion knowledge to explain these competing interpretations.

We propose that greater robot attentiveness simultaneously increases perceived warmth and suspicion of ulterior motives, which exert opposing effects on consumers’ acceptance of robot recommendations. We further argue that customer–retailer relationship strength provides relational context for interpreting the motives underlying attentive robot behavior. Across two scenario-based experiments and a retrospective consumer survey, the findings consistently support this dual-path account.