Social psychology offers a perspective on the acceptance and adoption of technology that is not often considered in technical circles. In this paper, we discuss several adoption-of-technology models with respect to the acceptance of domestic robots: we examine socialpsychology literature and apply it directly to humanrobot interaction. We raise key points that we feel will be pivotal to how domestic users respond to robots, and provide a set of guidelines that roboticists and designers of robotic interfaces can use to consider and analyze their designs. Ultimately, understanding how users respond to robots and the reasons behind their responses will enable designers to creating domestic robots that are accepted into homes.
The experience of interacting with a robot has been shown to be very different in comparison to people's interaction experience with other technologies and artifacts, and often has a strong social or emotional componenta difference that poses potential challenges related to the design and evaluation of HRI. In this paper we explore this difference, and its implications on evaluating HRI. We outline how this difference is due in part to the general complexity of robots' overall context of interaction, related to their dynamic presence in the real world and their tendency to invoke a sense of agency.We suggest that due to these differences HCI evaluation methods should be applied to HRI with care, and we present a survey of select HCI evaluation techniques from the perspective of the unique challenges of robots. We propose a view on social interaction with robots that we call the holistic interaction experience, and introduce a set of three perspectives for exploring social interaction with robots: visceral factors of interaction, social mechanics, and social structures. We demonstrate how our three perspectives can be used in practice, both as guidelines to discuss and categorize robot interaction, and as a component in the evaluation process. Further, we propose an original heuristic for brainstorming various possibilities of interaction experiences based on a concept we call the interaction experience map.
In designing and evaluating human-robot interactions and interfaces, researchers often use a simulated robot due to the high cost of robots and time required to program them. However, it is important to consider how interaction with a simulated robot differs from a real robot; that is, do simulated robots provide authentic interaction? We contribute to a growing body of work that explores this question and maps out simulated-versus-real differences, by explicitly investigating empathy: how people empathize with a physical or simulated robot when something bad happens to it. Our results suggest that people may empathize more with a physical robot than a simulated one, a finding that has important implications on the generalizability and applicability of simulated HRI work. Empathy is particularly relevant to social HRI and is integral to, for example, companion and care robots. Our contribution additionally includes an original and reproducible HRI experimental design to induce empathy toward robots in laboratory settings, and an experimentally validated empathy-measuring instrument from psychology for use with HRI.
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