Judging a bot by its cover: An experiment on expectation setting for personal robots

Managing user expectations of personal robots becomes particularly challenging when the end-user just wants to know what the robot can do, and neither understands nor cares about its technical specifications. In describing what a robot can do to such an end-user, we explored the questions of (a) whether or not such users would respond to expectation setting about personal robots and, if so, (b) how such expectation setting would influence human-robot interactions and people's perceptions of the robots. Using a 2 (expectation setting: high vs. low) x 2 (robot type: Pleo vs. AIBO) between-participants experiment (N = 24), we examined these questions. We found that people's initial beliefs about the robot's capabilities are indeed influenced by expectation setting tactics. Contrary to the hypotheses predicted by the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Confirmation Bias, we found that erring on the side of setting expectations lower rather than higher led to less disappointment and more positive appraisals of the robot's competence.