Does the Robot Get the Credit?: An Empirical Investigation on the Acquisition of Idiosyncrasy Credit by a Humanoid Robot in the Context of Negative Expectancy Violations

During interactions with others, people have expectancies concerning their communication partners' behaviors. Negative violations of these expectancies are known to exert an adverse impact on people's perceptions and attitudes. Likewise, with regard to human-robot interactions, previous research on one-time interactions indicates that people's evaluations of robots can deteriorate equally. To simultaneously investigate possible compensation for this effect, the concept of idiosyncrasy credit was tested for transferability to human-robot interactions. It postulates that compensation can be achieved by an individual's consistent, beneficial behavior over time that results in a social deviation credit. During an experimental medium-term study with a 2x2 between-subjects design, 80 participants interacted with a humanoid, social robot in three time-separated sessions distributed over an average time span of ten days. The robot's acquisition of idiosyncrasy credit was manipulated as well as the occurrence of a negative expectancy violation by systematically varying the robot's polite communication style. Results of repeated measures ANOVAs support the assumption that negative expectancy violations decrease people's evaluations of a robot. However, this effect seems non-persistent over time. Furthermore, no support for the robot's acquisition of idiosyncrasy credit was gained.