Expressing Ethnicity through Behaviors of a Robot Character

TL;DR

This paper explores how to evoke ethnic cues in robots through behaviors to foster homophily, aiming to improve human-robot interaction by enabling robots to express ethnicity convincingly.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology for selecting and evaluating ethnically salient behaviors in robots to evoke ethnic attribution and achieve homophily effects.

Findings

Robots can be perceived as ethnically similar through specific behaviors.

Verbal and nonverbal cues influence ethnic attribution of robots.

Homophily effects can be enhanced by culturally salient robot behaviors.

Abstract

Achieving homophily, or association based on similarity, between a human user and a robot holds a promise of improved perception and task performance. However, no previous studies that address homophily via ethnic similarity with robots exist. In this paper, we discuss the difficulties of evoking ethnic cues in a robot, as opposed to a virtual agent, and an approach to overcome those difficulties based on using ethnically salient behaviors. We outline our methodology for selecting and evaluating such behaviors, and culminate with a study that evaluates our hypotheses of the possibility of ethnic attribution of a robot character through verbal and nonverbal behaviors and of achieving the homophily effect.