Effects of Social Relationships on People’s Acceptance of Robots: Using Forms of Language by Robots

Abstract

This study investigated the difference in the levels of people’s acceptance of robots by the types of social relationships between humans and robots. In this study, social relationships between a robot and a person were categorized into four types consisted of two in the horizontal of social relationship (intimacy dimension) and two in the vertical of social relationship (status dimension). In dialogue between humans and robots, the types of social relationship were adjusted by forms of language such as calling by name and speech styles. People’s acceptance of robots was measured by people’s comfortable approach distance to the robot. Participants showed greater acceptance of a robot when the robot called them by their names. In the case of speech style, participants accepted the robot which used honorific speech style without addressing them by their name, while they accepted the robot which used familiar speech style with addressing them by their name. There was an interaction effect between gender and calling by name.