Investigating Robot Influence on Human Behaviour By Leveraging Entrainment Effects

Humans naturally tend to synchronize their movements with others, a phenomenon known as the entrainment effect, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. This phenomenon extends to interactions between humans and robots, which could have either positive or negative consequences for the human partner. We propose a human-subject study aimed at investigating the use of robots to influence human behaviour through entrainment in diverse Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. The current work involves two human-subject experiments investigating the impact of robots on short-term human behaviour, encompassing human-human and human-robot interactions. The goal is to comprehend how variations in robot actions, such as movement frequency during repetitive tasks, influence human perceptions and behaviours in collaborative lab-based settings. Another objective is to investigate the factors that make participants aware of the entrainment effect during HRI. The preliminary results of the HHI experiment provide evidence that individuals tend to synchronize their movements with another person.