Should a Robot Follow Social Norms? Human-Robot Interaction Design for Social Relations in Mixed Age Group

Social relations within a group are one of the factors that build the social context. Less attention has been paid to social relations within a group for human-robot interaction design. In this study, we designed different types of service behaviors for social relations in a mixed age group and conducted an experiment to investigate the effect of service behavior types (serving the elderly first versus serving the young first versus serving without priority) on a user's evaluation of a service robot. We only found that service evaluation and appropriateness of the robot were rated less positively under the condition of serving the young first than under other conditions. In addition, we found that the participants evaluated the robot serving the young first as impolite. The effect of the robot's behaviors on service evaluation and appropriateness was mediated by politeness. The current study provides an initial basis for human-robot interaction design for social norms in group-robot interaction.