We investigated how a presenter’s touching behaviors of an object during its explanation affect the observer’s perceived feelings of kawaii, a Japanese word that means “cute,” toward the object and the presenter. We conducted a face-to-face experiment with a robot presenter as well as a web survey experiment with both robot and human presenters. Based on the phenomenon that people more firmly touch an object when their perceived kawaii feeling is overwhelmingly strong, we investigated the effects of touching behavior with emphasized styles. First, we conducted a face-to-face experiment with a robot presenter where participants observed their presentations about an object to explain its characteristics. The results showed that participants who observed the robot’s touch behaviors perceived the object to be more kawaii and thought that the robot also felt the object was more kawaii. On the other hand, the results did not effectively show any increase in the participant’s feelings of kawaii toward the robot or the emphasized touch style. Based on these results, we next conducted a web survey experiment to investigate whether such knowledge about touching effects is applicable for human presenters. The results resembled those obtained when the presenter was a robot, i.e., viewing a touch behavior increased both the presenter’s perceived feelings of kawaii toward the object and the participant’s feelings of kawaii toward it. These results suggest that viewing the touch behaviors of others influenced the perceived emotional feelings toward both presenters and objects.

Although the capabilities of service robots are increasing, avoiding any mistakes is difficult. Therefore, strategies for mitigating mistakes, such as apology behavior designs, are essential for service robots. Past studies reported that costly apology is perceived as more sincere than non-costly ones and more acceptable. To increase the apology cost in robot service situations, we thought that using multiple robots would increase the perceived costs in the of financial, physical, and time costs. Therefore, we focused on the number of robots who apologize for their mistakes as well as their individual, specific roles and behaviors during such apologies. We investigated the differences in perceived impressions toward apologies from two robots (the main robot that makes a mistake and apologizes and a sub-robot that also apologizes) and an apology from just one robot (only the main robot) through a web survey with 168 valid participants. The experiment results showed that the participants significantly preferred and positively evaluated apologies from two robots more than one robot in the context of forgiveness, negative word-of-mouth, trust, and intention to use. We also conducted another web survey with 430 valid participants to investigate the effects of different roles for the sub-robot: apologize-only, cleaning-up-only, and both actions. The experimental results showed that the participants significantly preferred and positively evaluated both actions in the context of forgiveness and reliable/competent perspectives.

No abstract