Warmth and Competence in the Swarm: Designing Effective Human-Robot Teams
For designers of human-robot teams, this work demonstrates that social perception (warmth/competence) is more important than task efficiency for team preferences, highlighting the need to integrate social considerations into swarm design.
The paper investigates how swarm behaviors (broadcast duration, separation distance, robot speed) affect human perception of warmth and competence in human-robot teams. Results show longer broadcast durations increase warmth, larger separation distances increase competence, and speed has no effect; social perceptions predict team preferences more strongly than task performance.
As groups of robots increasingly collaborate with humans, understanding how humans perceive them is critical for designing effective human-robot teams. While prior research examined how humans interpret and evaluate the abilities and intentions of individual agents, social perception of robot teams remains relatively underexplored. Drawing on the competence-warmth framework, we conducted two studies manipulating swarm behaviors in completing a collective search task and measured the social perception of swarm behaviors when human participants are either observers (Study 1) and operators (Study 2). Across both studies, our results show that variations in swarm behaviors consistently influenced participants' perceptions of warmth and competence. Notably, longer broadcast durations increased perceived warmth; larger separation distances increased perceived competence. Interestingly, individual robot speed had no effect on either of the perceptions. Furthermore, our results show that these social perceptions predicted participants' team preferences more strongly than task performance. Participants preferred robot teams that were both warm and competent, not those that completed tasks most quickly. These findings demonstrate that human-robot interaction dynamically shapes social perception, underscoring the importance of integrating both technical and social considerations when designing robot swarms for effective human-robot collaboration.