Social Robot Encouraging Two Strangers to Talk with Each Other for Their Relationships

We investigated a hypothesis that a conversation between two strangers would be encouraged and they would improve each other's likability if a robot induced them to have a small talk in advance. In our experiment a participant remained in a waiting space with an experimental cooperator for five minutes, and then they did a collaborative task together. The experiment had two conditions: One was the with-intervention condition in which a robot asked them to do a small talk when they remained in the waiting space, another was the without-intervention condition in which there was no robot in the waiting space. The results showed that the number of participant's utterances in the collaborative task had no significant difference (t=-0.676, p=0.511, d=-0.350), and likability rating of the cooperator by the participant also had no significant difference (t=- 0.781, p=0.449, d=0.404). These results did not support the hypothesis. It suggested that it was difficult to affect a relationship between two strangers by a robot prompting them to speak simply.