Dancing With Myself: The effect of majority group size on perceptions of majority and minority robot group members

Abstract

While social psychology has identified characteristics of intergroup dynamics, few studies have looked into the perceptions of robot group dynamics. In this experiment, we separate robots into majority and minority groups based solely on their behavior in a simple dance routine. We attempt to understand how people’s perceptions of robots within those groups change based on group size and features of behavior. Participants viewed the robot dances and rated one robot from each group on a variety of characteristics. We find that being from the minority versus majority group has a significant impact on perceptions of a robot’s creativity, interestingness, anti-sociality, dancing ability, and how much of a team player it is. At the same time, individual behaviors (leading the dance, following the dance, or performing an entirely unique dance) have no statistical effect on participants’ ratings of robot characteristics. From these results, we conclude that group size has a larger effect than behavior on subjective evaluations of robots in majority and minority groups.