Reciprocity [48] is an important factor in human-human interaction (HHI), so it can be expected that it should also play a major role in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Participants in our study played the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game (RPDG) and the mini Ultimatum Game (mUG) with robot and human agents, with the agents using either Tit for Tat (TfT) or Random strategies. As part of the study we also measured the perceived personality traits in the agents using the TIPI test after every round of RPDG and mUG. The results show that the participants collaborated more with humans than with a robot, however they tended to be equally reciprocal with both agents. The experiment also showed the TfT strategy as the most profitable strategy; affecting collaboration, reciprocation, profit and joint profit in the game. Most of the participants tended to be fairer with the human agent in mUG. Furthermore, robots were perceived as less open and agreeable than humans. Consciousness, extroversion and emotional stability were perceived roughly the same in humans and robots. TfT strategy became associated with an extroverted and agreeable personality in the agents. We could observe that the norm of reciprocity applied in Human-Robot Interaction has potential implications for robot design.

The question put forward in this paper is whether robots can create conformity by means of group pressure. We recreate and expand on a classic social psychology experiment by Solomon Asch, so as to explore three main dimensions. First, we wanted to know whether robots can prompt conformity in human subjects, and whether there is a significant difference between the degree to which individuals conform to a group of robots as opposed to a group of humans. Secondly we ask whether group pressure (from human or robot peers) can exert influence in verbal judgments, analogously to the influence on visual judgments that is known from previous research [3], [2]. Thirdly, we investigate whether the level of conformity differs between an ambiguous situation and a non-ambiguous situation.Our results show that in both visual and verbal tasks, participants exhibit conformity with human peers, but not with robot peers. The social influence of robot peers is not a significant predictor of verbal or visual judgments in our tasks. Furthermore, the level of conformity is significantly higher in an ambiguous (unclear) situation.

In this article, we discuss the results of an experiment designed to test the boundaries of linguistic imitation in a group setting. While most prior work has focused on convergence in either sound structure or syntax, we investigate whether speakers' choices in verb morphology are influenced by others. The experiment uses an Aschtype peer pressure methodology. Participants give responses to target stimuli in a verbal and a visual task in a group of human peers, a group of robots, or alone. These results demonstrate that morphological conformity occurs, but that it is socially constrained-it happens with human peers but not with robot peers. This supports a view of linguistic convergence as a deeply social process. The level of linguistic conformity displayed by individuals is related to their degree of conformity in nonlinguistic tasks, suggesting that there are individual propensities toward peer imitation that transcend modalities.

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Robots are able to influence the usage of human language even after the interaction between the human and robot has ended. Humans influence each other in the usage of words and hence the robots they program indirectly affect the development of our society's vocabulary. Most human-robot interaction studies focus on one robot interacting with one human. Studying the dynamic development of language in a group of humans and robots is difficult and requires considerable resource. We therefore conducted a social simulation of a human-robot communication network based on a real-world human-human network, allowing us to study how the centrality of the robots' owners influences the propagation of words in the network and what influence the number of robots in the network has on achieving a Fixation State. Our results show that robots owned by highly connected people has less effect on the dynamics of language than robots owned by less connected people. Highly connected people interact with many others, and therefore are more strongly influenced by a greater number of people and their robots. We have found that 11% of the humans owning a robot is sufficient for the robots to dominate the development of the language resulting in 95% of the humans using or adopting their words.

More and more people suffer from chronic health issues related to posture and lack of movement in their office work. We developed a novel approach to motivate employees to be more physically active.Our approach focuses on using the social characteristics of the NAO robot platform to deliver social cues for motivation. Like a coworker who is very motivated to exercise, we used NAO to invite employees to do short "micro-exercises" along with NAO. This approach has multiple advantages when compared to conventional notification systems. Our pilot study shows that employees found it easy and enjoyable to perform micro-exercises with NAO. According to our qualitative data, NAO's social appearance was essential for the motivation of the employees.

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