Robots can contribute to employee wellbeing – but how they look matters
Published on: Sunday, March 19, 2023
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ETX Daily Up, FMT
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Robots that look like WALL-E are perceived as good, helpful, and non-threatening. Plus, they’re really cute. (Disney pic)
The team conducted an experiment at a technology consulting firm, asking 26 employees to participate in weekly wellness sessions led by robots for four weeks. All of these robot “coaches” had identical voices, facial expressions and scripts to conduct these sessions.
“We interviewed different wellbeing coaches, and then we programmed our robots to have a coach-like personality, with high openness and conscientiousness,” explained study co-author Minja Axelsson.
What the scientists discovered was that the participants interacted differently with the robot in relation to its physical appearance. In fact, people who did wellbeing sessions with a toy-like robot reported feeling closer to their “coach” than those who worked with a humanoid-looking device.
This difference in perception could be explained, in part, by the extremely varied representations of robots in all areas of pop culture, and especially in the movies. Some, like WALL-E and R2-D2, are portrayed as good and helpful, while others are depicted as being much more threatening to humans.
Toy-like robots look much simpler than machines with a humanoid form, possibly making them easier to talk to and connect with. (Hatice Gunes pics)
But the researchers also suggest that we may unconsciously project expectations onto robots based on their physical appearance. Toy-like robots look much simpler and easier to connect with than humanoid machines, possibly because this leads to lower expectations.
Meanwhile, humanoid robots are so realistic that they give the illusion of being autonomous subjects, capable of carrying out a conversation with anyone, which can lead to disappointment.
“We programmed the robots with a script, but participants were hoping there would be more interactivity. It’s incredibly difficult to create a robot that’s capable of natural conversation. New developments in large language models could really be beneficial in this respect,” said lead author Hatice Gunes, a professor of emotional intelligence and robotics at Cambridge.
Nevertheless, the study participants were generally satisfied with their robot-led coaching sessions and affirmed that they were open to the idea of trying the experience again in the future.
