The Effects of Intimacy and Proactivity on Trust in Human-Humanoid Robot Interaction

Social humanoid robots (SHRs) have been widely applied in diverse contexts to enhance human–robot interaction by imitating humanlike behavior. Previous studies have utilized a variety of design features to explore the influence of human–robot relationships, but the robot’s communication scheme when providing assistance during the interaction is rarely discussed. The purpose of this study is to investigate which SHR communication approaches are more favorable for users, where different levels of social manner (proactive vs. reactive) and types of expressive behavior (intimate vs. impassive) are developed and empirically validated. A total of 273 participants were recruited for our user studies, and two online survey sessions were conducted to simulate an online shopping experience. During the experiments, an SHR (the Pepper robot) was used to provide the associated services to the participants (such as providing recommendations or subjective opinions regarding a chosen product). The preliminary study confirmed that the manipulations designed for each experimental condition were valid. In the formal study, the results revealed strong evidence that both the SHR’s social manner and its expressive behavior significantly influence participant perceptions of robots and the resultant HRI experience.