Multi-party Interaction in Public Spaces: Cross-Cultural Variations in Parental and Nonparental Response to Robots’ Adaptive Strategies

Abstract

Social environments are often complex and ambiguous: Many queries to the robot are collaborative and do not have an assigned addressee, for example, a family. In contrast, in the case of conflicting queries, social robots need to participate in value decisions and negotiate multi-party interactions. With the aim of investi- gating who robots should adapt to (children or adults) in multi-party negotiations within human–robot interactions in public spaces, this chapter presents two stud- ies: a real-world study conducted in a shopping mall and a follow-up cross-cultural study conducted online. The results include a number of interesting findings based on people’s relationship with a child and their parental status. In addition, a number of cross-cultural differences were identified in respondents’ attitudes toward robot’s multi-party adaptation in various public settings.