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A wide range of studies in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has shown that robots can influence the social behavior of humans. This phenomenon is commonly explained by the Media Equation. Fundamental to this theory is the idea that when faced with technology (like robots), people perceive it as a social agent with thoughts and intentions similar to those of humans. This perception guides the interaction with the technology and its predicted impact. However, HRI studies have also reported examples in which the Media Equation has been violated, that is when people treat the influence of robots differently from the influence of humans. To address this gap, we propose a model of Robot Social Influence (RoSI) with two contributing factors. The first factor is a robot’s violation of a person’s expectations, whether the robot exceeds expectations or fails to meet expectations. The second factor is a person’s social belonging with the robot, whether the person belongs to the same group as the robot or a different group. These factors are primary predictors of robots’ social influence and commonly mediate the influence of other factors. We review HRI literature and show how RoSI can explain robots’ social influence in concrete HRI scenarios.
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Death of a Robot: Social Media Reactions and Language Usage when a Robot Stops Operating
People take to social media to share their thoughts, joys, and sorrows. A recent popular trend has been to support and mourn people and pets that have died as well as other objects that have suffered catastrophic damage. As several popular robots have been discontinued, including the Opportunity Rover, Jibo, and Kuri, we are interested in how language used to mourn these robots compares to that to mourn people, animals, and other objects. We performed a study in which we asked participants to categorize deidentified Twitter reactions as referencing the death of a person, an animal, a robot, or another object. Most reactions were labeled as being about humans, which suggests that people use similar language to describe feelings for animate and inanimate entities. We used a natural language toolkit to analyze language from a larger set of tweets. A majority of tweets about Opportunity included second-person ("you") and gendered third-person pronouns (she/he versus it), but terms like "R.I.P" were reserved almost exclusively for humans and animals. Our findings suggest that people verbally mourn robots similarly to living things, but reserve some language for people.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734456
- PAR ID:
- 10169391
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 589 to 597
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3319502.3374794
