Social Engagement in Public Places: A Tale of One Robot

In this paper, we describe a large-scale (over 4000 participants) observational field study at a public venue, designed to explore how social a robot needs to be for people to engage with it. In this study we examined a prediction of Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) framework: the more machines present human-like characteristics in a consistent manner, the more likely they are to invoke a social response. Our humanoid robot's behavior varied in the amount of social cues, from no active social cues to increasing levels of social cues during story-telling to human-like game-playing interaction. We found several strong aspects of support for CASA: the robot that provides even minimal social cues (speech) is more engaging than a robot that does nothing, and the more human-like the robot behaved during story-telling, the more social engagement was observed. However, contrary to the prediction, the robot's game-playing did not elicit more engagement than other, less social behaviors.