Motions of robots matter! The social effects of idle and meaningful motions

Abstract

Humans always move, even when “doing” nothing, but robots typically remain immobile. According to the threshold model of social influence [3] people respond socially on the basis of social verification. If applied to human-robot interaction this model would predict that people increase their social responses depending on the social verification of the robot. On other hand, the media equation hypothesis [11] holds that people will automatically respond socially when interacting with artificial agents. In our study a simple joint task was used to expose our participants to different levels of social verification. Low social verification was portrayed using idle motions and high social verification was portrayed using meaningful motions. Our results indicate that social responses increase with the level of social verification in line with the threshold model of social influence.