Exploring the role of a social robot in building a sense of connection

Abstract An important but under-explored use case for socially assistive robotics is in community formation. In this work, we conduct a novel investigation into the ability of a social robot to encourage human-human relationships among users. We conduct a between-subjects Wizard-of-Oz experiment in which we focus on the robot’s role in interaction as a determinant in the sense of connection that participants feel as a result of interacting with the robot. N=86 college-age participants were recruited to watch a video with a robot, where the robot’s group membership and behavior were adjusted to reflect different roles. We vary the robot’s group membership along three levels: the same group as the participants, engaging in the same activity as the participants, or simply being in the same room and acknowledging the participants, with a control condition of no robot present. Before, during, and after the video, the robot would speak to encourage interaction between participants and the robot when applicable. After the video was concluded, participant sense of connection was measured through a series of Likert surveys. We find that inter-user conversation increased when the robot actively participated in the video viewing and asked questions of the users compared to when the robot did not. We also find some exploratory evidence that these effects might extend to user attitudes about not only each other but also the laboratory running the experiment.