Theory of Companions: What Can Theoretical Models Contribute to Applications and Understanding of Human-Robot Interaction?

Sharing a life with Harvey: Exploring the acceptance of and relationship-building with a social robot

“…Using RFID-tags is not a natural humanlike way of interacting with one another and the interaction dialogs were rather simple, which both influence the results of our preliminary exploratory study. Yet, the older adults did seem to positively evaluate the hedonic social interactions of the robot, and, as stated by Krämer, Eimler, von der Pütten, and Payr (2011), in the end it is the user that defines communication, relationship and roles. Furthermore, because of the exploratory nature of this study, there were only a few participants and they may not be representative for the kind of elderly who might need a domestic robot in the near future.…”

“…In this paper we only occasionally refer to the video data results. For an extensive analysis of the video data, see the study of von der Pütten, Krämer, and Eimler (2011). The main conclusions were that there are massive interindividual differences with regard to all categories of behavior.…”

What Makes Robots Social?: A User’s Perspective on Characteristics for Social Human-Robot Interaction

“…People interact with and respond socially to robots (e.g., [10] [12]). Therefore, some researchers argue that it seems unnecessary to depart from the social rules of human-human interaction when evaluating human-robot interactions [9]. Thus, a first recommendation is that social roboticists should investigate theories of interpersonal communication to create better social robots.…”

An Ethical Evaluation of Human–Robot Relationships

“…Along with this human tendency to respond socially to nonhuman objects, it has been argued that the fundamental human motivation of the 'need to belong' [8,17] not only induces ones desire for meaningful and enduring relationships with other social beings, but also facilitates the likelihood people may form emotional attachments to artificial beings [43]. This issue of bonding with nonhuman objects is likely to be enlarged when these objects possess lifelike abilities and are endowed with humanlike capacities, as is the case for socially interactive robots.…”