2026-10-12T22:23:15Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.0102b 2026-08-26T13:40:45Z

2026-08-26 The Double-Edged Effect of Heightened Robot Attentiveness on Recommendation Acceptance doi:10.57760/sciencedb.0102b en Robot attentiveness is typically viewed as a desirable service characteristic, yet its implications for robot recommendations are not straightforward. 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. Greater robot attentiveness increases both perceived warmth and suspicion of ulterior motives, generating positive and negative indirect effects, respectively, on recommendation acceptance. Moreover, stronger customer–retailer relationships amplify the warmth pathway, whereas weaker relationships strengthen the suspicion pathway.  Service robot attentiveness; Perceived warmth; Suspicion of ulterior motives; Recommendation acceptance; Customer–retailer relationship strength Xie RESTRICTED dataset Science Data Bank