Warmth and Competence in the Swarm: Designing Effective Human-Robot Teams

TL;DR

This study explores how variations in swarm behaviors influence human perceptions of warmth and competence, affecting preferences in human-robot teams beyond mere task performance.

Contribution

It applies the competence-warmth framework to robot swarms, revealing how specific behaviors impact social perceptions and team preferences.

Findings

Longer broadcast durations increase perceived warmth.

Larger separation distances increase perceived competence.

Perceptions of warmth and competence predict team preferences more than task speed.

Abstract

As groups of robots increasingly collaborate with humans, understanding how humans perceive them is critical for designing effective human-robot teams. While prior research examined how humans interpret and evaluate the abilities and intentions of individual agents, social perception of robot teams remains relatively underexplored. Drawing on the competence-warmth framework, we conducted two studies manipulating swarm behaviors in completing a collective search task and measured the social perception of swarm behaviors when human participants are either observers (Study 1) and operators (Study 2). Across both studies, our results show that variations in swarm behaviors consistently influenced participants' perceptions of warmth and competence. Notably, longer broadcast durations increased perceived warmth; larger separation distances increased perceived competence. Interestingly, individual robot speed had no effect on either of the perceptions. Furthermore, our results show that these social perceptions predicted participants' team preferences more strongly than task performance. Participants preferred robot teams that were both warm and competent, not those that completed tasks most quickly. These findings demonstrate that human-robot interaction dynamically shapes social perception, underscoring the importance of integrating both technical and social considerations when designing robot swarms for effective human-robot collaboration.