There is a growing interest in the Human-Robot Interaction community
towards studying the effect of the attitude of a social robot during the
interaction with users. Similar to human-human interaction, variations
in the robot’s attitude may cause substantial differences in the
perception of the robot. In this work, we present a preliminary study to
assess the effects of the robot’s verbal attitude while playing
rock-paper-scissors with several subjects. During the game the robot was
programmed to behave either in a polite or impolite manner by changing
the content of the utterances. In the experiments, 12 participants
played with the robot and completed a questionnaire to evaluate their
impressions. The results showed that a polite robot is perceived as more
likable and more engaging than a rude, defiant robot.