Do We Really Like Robots That Match Our Personality? The Case Of Big-Five Traits, Godspeed Scores And Robotic Gestures

This work investigates the role of the attraction paradigm - the tendency to associate similarity and attraction in interpersonal relations - in Human-Robot Interaction. The experiment presented here involved 30 human observers who watched and rated 45 robotic gestures in terms of Big-Five personality traits and Godspeed scores. The results show that, for 24 of the 30 observers, there was a statistically significant correlation between the Godspeed scores and the perceived similarity between the robot's personality and their own. However, the association was positive for 15 subjects meaning that for these there is a similarity-attraction effect and negative for the other 9 - meaning that for these there is a complementarity-attraction effect. Furthermore, the strength of the effect depends on the particular trait under examination.