We are all Individuals: The Role of Robot Personality and Human Traits in Trustworthy Interaction
This addresses the challenge of optimizing robot design for specific roles to enhance trust in human-robot interactions, though it is incremental as it builds on existing personality research in robotics.
The study tackled the problem of designing robot personalities for trustworthy human-robot interaction by showing that an extrovert robot is preferred and trusted more than an introvert robot for a Robo-Barista, regardless of human personality, with trust ratings influenced by individual attitudes towards robots.
As robots take on roles in our society, it is important that their appearance, behaviour and personality are appropriate for the job they are given and are perceived favourably by the people with whom they interact. Here, we provide an extensive quantitative and qualitative study exploring robot personality but, importantly, with respect to individual human traits. Firstly, we show that we can accurately portray personality in a social robot, in terms of extroversion-introversion using vocal cues and linguistic features. Secondly, through garnering preferences and trust ratings for these different robot personalities, we establish that, for a Robo-Barista, an extrovert robot is preferred and trusted more than an introvert robot, regardless of the subject's own personality. Thirdly, we find that individual attitudes and predispositions towards robots do impact trust in the Robo-Baristas, and are therefore important considerations in addition to robot personality, roles and interaction context when designing any human-robot interaction study.