Observer Perception of Dominance and Mirroring Behavior in Human-Robot Relationships

Abstract

How people view relationships between humans and robots is an important consideration for the design and acceptance of social robots. Two studies investigated the effect of relational behavior in a human-robot dyad. In Study 1, participants watched videos of a human confederate discussing the Desert Survival Task with either another human confederate or a humanoid robot. Participants were less trusting of both the robot and the person in a human-robot relationship where the robot was dominant toward the person than when the person was dominant toward the robot; these differences were not found for a human pair. In Study 2, participants watched videos of a human confederate having an everyday conversation with either another human confederate or a humanoid robot. Participants who saw a confederate mirror the gestures of a robot found the robot less attractive than when the robot mirrored the confederate; the opposite effect was found for a human pair. Exploratory findings suggest that human-robot relationships are viewed differently than human dyads.

Dominance and movement cues of robot motion: A user study on trust and predictability

“…We call robot motion dominant when the robot continues with its task despite possible collision with the co-working person, forcing the person to avoid it, and submissive when the robot interrupts its movement, allowing the person to complete their planned movement and work on the task. In social interactions, dominance has been shown to correlate with lower trust in the robot [15].…”

“…Previous works claim that humans prefer to perform their own task and make the robot wait, rather than yielding priority to the robot [15], [16]. Observation of human behavior during submissive movement strategies showed that 22 of the participants chose to continue with their task when the robot approached the workspace and then stopped, indicating that they were comfortable assuming a more dominant role in the interaction, whereas only 3 moved their hand or body back to allow the robot to continue, indicating that they allowed the robot to dominate in the interaction.…”

A Robust Framework for Estimating Linguistic Alignment in Twitter Conversations

“…This communication accommodation [20] is a pervasive part of human interactive behavior, arising in many di↵erent dimensions of interaction, including gesture, posture, tone, and language use [11,3,21,32,26,9]. From a scientific perspective, greater degrees of accommodation can signal power relationships or a liation [48,23,14], and from an engineering perspective, interactive agents that accommodate (or "mirror") are seen as friendlier and more human [35,33]. One of the most important and well-studied forms of accommodation is linguistic alignment, in which conversational partners align aspects of their communicative style and content to one another.…”

Communicating Dominance in a Nonanthropomorphic Robot Using Locomotion

“…It is therefore unsurprising that past work on dominance in robots mostly conveys dominance using principles from interpersonal psychology. Li et al [25] found that people disliked a humanoid robot when it spoke dominantly and used dominant posture compared to subordinate speech and posture. Groom et al [15] found that people disliked a humanoid robot when it blamed its user for poor performance (an evaluative act that can be used to establish dominance) compared to when it did not.…”

“…Dominance is a key part of social expression in primates and other animals because it can be used to resolve conflicting goals or to place oneself in a social hierarchy. Researchers have explored how dominance can be perceived in anthropomorphic robots using dominance cues from interpersonal psychology, such as standing or relative height [25,33]. However, broader guidelines on how to express dominance are missing in the human-robot interaction literature.…”