The Dynamics of Anthropomorphism in Robotics

Many robotics researchers tend to believe that anthropomorphism describes a set of human-like features of a robot (like shape, speech capabilities, facial expression). We refer to these characteristics as the anthropomorphic design of the robot [1]. Anthropomorphism, on the other hand, refers to the social phenomenon that emerges from the interaction between a robot and an user. According to Epley et al. [2], this includes for instance emotional states, motivations, intentions ascribed by the user to the robot.