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Early encounters between humans and social robots are brief but formative moments that shape future interaction. These moments are hard to study because they rely on pre-reflective, embodied behaviors often missed in task-driven experiments. We propose an embodied, performative methodology in which trained performers improvise with a social robot; subtle relational dynamics are then captured through micro-behavioral video analysis. In five workshops, we observed confident bids for connection, moments of micro-interruption, and adaptive strategies such as mirroring and attunement that repaired disrupted interactions. This lens reveals how early relationality is enacted and maintained, offering HCI researchers new methodological and design insights for making social robots more legible and responsive during first contact.
Honauer et al. (Mon,) studied this question.