Building a Collaborative Relationship between Human and Robot through Verbal and Non-Verbal Interaction

Interpersonal communication and relationship building promote successful collaborations. This study investigated the effect of conversational nonverbal and verbal interactions of a robot on bonding and relationship building with a human partner. Participants interacted with two robots that differed in their nonverbal and verbal expressiveness. The interactive robot actively engaged the participant in a conversation before, during and after a collaborative task whereas the non-interactive robot remained passive. The robots' nonverbal and verbal interactions increased participants' perception of the robot as a social actor and strengthened bonding and relationship building between human and robot. The results of our study indicate that the evaluation of the collaboration improves when the robot maintains eye contact, the robot is attributed a certain personality, and the robot is perceived as being alive. Our study could not show that an interactive robot receives more help by the collaboration partner. Future research should investigate additional factors that facilitate helpful behavior among humans, such as similarity, attributional judgement and empathy.