Existential Crisis: A Social Robot's Reason for Being

TL;DR

This study explores how a robot's display of personality influences user perception and emotional response, comparing personality-driven and neutral robots through user interactions and questionnaires.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup using LLMs and speech tech to assess personality effects on robot perception in a controlled study.

Findings

Personality displays affect user emotional states

Participants perceive personality-driven robots more favorably

Study demonstrates feasibility of using LLMs for robot personality expression

Abstract

As Robots become ever more important in our daily lives there's growing need for understanding how they're perceived by people. This study aims to investigate how the user perception of robots is influenced by displays of personality. Using LLMs and speech to text technology, we designed a within-subject study to compare two conditions: a personality-driven robot and a purely task-oriented, personality-neutral robot. Twelve participants, recruited from Socially Intelligent Robotics course at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, interacted with a robot Nao tasked with asking them a set of medical questions under both conditions. After completing both interactions, the participants completed a user experience questionnaire measuring their emotional states and robot perception using standardized questionnaires from the SRI and Psychology literature.