Mechanical Chameleons: Evaluating the effects of a social robot's non-verbal behavior on social influence
This addresses the problem of designing effective social robots for human interaction, but it is incremental due to small sample size and lack of significant findings.
The study investigated how a social robot's non-verbal behavior, controlled in real-time based on user facial gestures, affects social influence and decision-making in a survival task, but found no significant differences between three strategies (still, natural movement, copy) in preliminary results with 12 participants.
In this paper we present a pilot study which investigates how non-verbal behavior affects social influence in social robots. We also present a modular system which is capable of controlling the non-verbal behavior based on the interlocutor's facial gestures (head movements and facial expressions) in real time, and a study investigating whether three different strategies for facial gestures ("still", "natural movement", i.e. movements recorded from another conversation, and "copy", i.e. mimicking the user with a four second delay) has any affect on social influence and decision making in a "survival task". Our preliminary results show there was no significant difference between the three conditions, but this might be due to among other things a low number of study participants (12).