Expressing Ethnicity through Behaviors of a Robot Character
This addresses the lack of studies on ethnic similarity with robots for improved human-robot interaction, though it is incremental as it builds on existing homophily concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of achieving ethnic homophily between humans and robots by using ethnically salient behaviors, and found that it is possible to attribute ethnicity to a robot through verbal and nonverbal behaviors to achieve the homophily effect.
Achieving homophily, or association based on similarity, between a human user and a robot holds a promise of improved perception and task performance. However, no previous studies that address homophily via ethnic similarity with robots exist. In this paper, we discuss the difficulties of evoking ethnic cues in a robot, as opposed to a virtual agent, and an approach to overcome those difficulties based on using ethnically salient behaviors. We outline our methodology for selecting and evaluating such behaviors, and culminate with a study that evaluates our hypotheses of the possibility of ethnic attribution of a robot character through verbal and nonverbal behaviors and of achieving the homophily effect.