An Exploration of Social Grouping in Robots: Effects of Behavioral Mimicry, Appearance, and Eye Gaze

Abstract

People naturally and easily establish social groupings based on appearance, behavior, and other nonverbal signals. However, psychologists have yet to understand how these varied signals interact. For example, which factor has the strongest effect on establishing social groups? What happens when two of the factors conflict? Part of the difficulty of answering these questions is that people are unique and stochastic stimuli. To address this problem, we use robots as a visually simple and precisely controllable platform for examining the relative influence of social grouping features. We examine how behavioral mimicry, similarity of appearance, and direction of gaze influence peoples’ perception of which group a robot belongs to. Experimental data shows that behavioral mimicry has the most dominant influence on social grouping, though this influence is modulated by appearance. Non-mutual gaze was found to be a weak modulator of the perception of grouping. These results provide insight into the phenomenon of social grouping, and suggest areas for future exploration.