Social facilitation with social robots?

Regarding the future usage of social robots in workplace scenarios, we addressed the question of potential mere robotic presence effects on human performance. Applying the experimental social facilitation paradigm in social robotics, we compared task performance of 106 participants on easy and complex cognitive and motoric tasks across three presence groups (alone vs. human present vs. robot present). Results revealed significant evidence for the predicted social facilitation effects for both human and robotic presence compared to an alone condition. Implications of these findings are discussed with regard to the consideration of the interaction of robotic presence and task difficulty in modeling robotic assistance systems.