Human Expectations of Social Robots

A key assumption that drives much of HRI research is that human robot collaboration can be improved by advancing a robot's capabilities. We argue that this assumption has potentially negative implications, as increasing social capabilities in robots can produce an expectations gap where humans develop unrealistically high expectations of social robots due to generalization from human mental models. By conducting two studies with 674 participants, we examine how people develop and adjust mental models of robots. We find that both a robot's physical appearance and its behavior influence how we form these models. This suggests it is possible for a robot to unintentionally manipulate a human into building an inaccurate mental model of its overall abilities simply by displaying a few capabilities that humans possess, such as speaking and turn-taking. We conclude that this expectations gap, if not corrected for, could ironically result in less effective collaborations as robot capabilities improve.