Human Group Presence, Group Characteristics, and Group Norms Affect Human-Robot Interaction in Naturalistic Settings

Abstract

As robots become more prevalent in public spaces, such as museums, malls, and schools, they are coming into increasing contact with groups of people, rather than just individuals. Groups, compared to individuals, can differ in robot acceptance based on the mere presence of a group, group characteristics such as entitativity (i.e., cohesiveness), and group social norms; however, group dynamics are seldom studied in relation to robots in naturalistic settings. To examine how these factors affect human-robot interaction, we observed 2,714 people in a Japanese mall receiving directions from the humanoid robot Robovie. Video and survey responses evaluating the interaction indicate that groups, especially entitative groups, interacted more often, for longer, and more positively with the robot than individuals. Participants also followed the social norms of the groups they were part of; participants who would not be expected to interact with the robot based on their individual characteristics were more likely to interact with it if other members of their group did. These results illustrate the importance of taking into account the presence of a group, group characteristics, and group norms when designing robots for successful interactions in naturalistic settings.

Multi-party Turn-Taking in Repeated Human–Robot Interactions: An Interdisciplinary Evaluation

“…Other noteworthy research include: the effects of robot moderation in a team collaborative game, in which the robot influenced the trade-off between social cohesion of the group and the task performance [49], robot controlling the level of engagement between main and side-participants in a four-party setting [34], facilitating inter-group trust through exhibition of vulnerable behavior [54], building relationships and facilitating with children through praise, competition encouragement, sympathy, stimulation [48]. Recent work [18] indicates how human-robot interaction can be affected by factors such as group presence, cohesiveness and group social norms. The above studies show that social robots are taking up more active roles in group interaction and start to influence the behaviors of the individuals, as well as the group altogether.…”

“…In recent research Fraune et al [18] observed 2714 people interacting with the social robot in a naturalistic setting and reported how group presence, group cohesiveness and group social norms can influence the human-robot interaction. We argue that interpersonal relationships, such as: family, friendship, work, as well as age and sex differences, can be a strong factor in turn-taking, especially in the case of our experimental scenario, which required reaching a consensus in selecting the answer.…”

I-C-E Framework: Concepts for Group Dynamics Research in Human-Robot Interaction

“…Alves-Oliveira and colleagues developed a framework to distinguish individual-level and grouplevel emotional expression in interactions in HRI and introduced the concept of emotional climate to HRI [24]. Observational research of robots interacting with human individuals and groups in the wild show ample indicators of how the constellation of different groups encountered by a robot shapes interactions -often with the result that the robot is unequipped to handle the situation efficiently and socially adequate [25,5]. Moreover, researchers investigated in interaction studies the influence of the size of a robot group, for instance with regard to how well participants can detect those robots which indicate attention toward the human by gaze behaviour [26].…”

“…Dyads can be very intimate and unique groups and thus belong to their own category for research [31]. -Dyadic interactions have been primarily studied in the HRI community [5] and the present paper is supposed to shift the attention from only dyadic interactions to triadic and more.…”

“…In consideration of findings from group dynamics research and the likely event of robots playing a part in social settings in the near future, research on robots and groups is necessary. Still, groups that interact with robots or robot groups are seldom studied, although the need for a paradigm shift has been acknowledged [5,6].…”