Do We Really Like Robots that Match our Personality? The Case of Big-Five Traits, Godspeed Scores and Robotic Gestures

This work investigates the role of the attraction paradigm - the tendency to associate similarity and attraction in interpersonal relations - in Human-Robot Interaction. The experiment presented here involved 30 human observers who watched and rated 45 robotic gestures in terms of Big-Five personality traits and Godspeed scores. The results show that, for 24 of the 30 observers, there was a statistically significant correlation between the Godspeed scores and the perceived similarity between the robot's personality and their own. However, the association was positive for 15 subjects - meaning that for these there is a similarity-attraction effect - and negative for the other 9 - meaning that for these there is a complementarity-attraction effect. Furthermore, the strength of the effect depends on the particular trait under examination.