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Expectations and Human-Robot Interaction. The influence of robot expectations on personality attribution, impressions and anthropomorphism

Rutjes, J.A.J. (2013) Expectations and Human-Robot Interaction. The influence of robot expectations on personality attribution, impressions and anthropomorphism.

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Abstract:More and more social robots are introduced to the consumer market. This means that it is important to investigate how and why humans interact with a social robot. The current study investigated if expectations of a social robot would influence the impressions humans had of a social robot, the degree to which humans anthropomorphised a social robot and to what extent humans would assign their own personality traits to that of the social robot. We also studied the influence of matching personality traits, between human and robot, on the impressions that this human had of the social robot. The results, from a between-participants experiment (high expectations and low expectations), indicated that participants had more positive impressions of a social robot when there was a matching conscientiousness personality. This finding supports the similarity-attraction hypothesis (Byrne et al, 1986). The assumed similarity and attributive projection theory were supported within this study for the agreeableness personality trait (Cronbach, 1995; Holmes, 1978). Participants who described themselves as being agreeable, tended to assign this personality trait to a social robot. This result was most visible in the low expectations condition. We also found that participants within the high expectations condition had more positive impressions of a social robot in comparison with participants within the low expectations conditions. This means that the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Confirmation Bias, in case of high expectations, were confirmed within this study (Merton, 1948; Nickerson, 1998). We also found similar results for anthropomorphism. Participants within the high expectations condition anthropomorphised the social robot to a higher degree than participants within the low expectations condition. We recommend that future research should also study expectations and how it influences human-robot interaction, whereby they use a different kind and/or type of robot.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:05 communication studies
Programme:Communication Studies MSc (60713)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/63537
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