Pepper: A humanoid robot with personality?

Abstract

Perceived personality plays an important role in human-robot interaction. This paper uses the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2-S) to assess the perceived personality of a type Pepper social robot. Pepper provided a sample of its capabilities during an introduction to academic writing university course. N = 462 students evaluated Pepper's personality by answering the BFI-2-S questions. A confirmatory factor analysis with the implied five-factor structure did not converge. A subsequent exploratory factor analysis yielded inconclusive results. Although we were not able to provide evidence for a Big Five personality structure of the social robot, perceived personality may be an important characteristic of a social robot: The latent correlation of a factor labeled 'positive characteristics' with the intention to use the robot equals .487.