Abstract
We designed a wine recommendation robot and deployed it in a small supermarket. In a study aimed to evaluate our design we found that people with no intent to buy wine were interacting with the robot rather than the intended audience of wine-buying customers. Behavioural data, moreover, suggests a very different evaluation of the robot than the surveys that were completed. We also found that groups were interacting more with the robot than individuals, a finding that has been reported more often in the literature. All of these findings taken together suggest that a novelty effect may have been at play. It also suggests that field studies should take this effect more seriously. The main contribution of our work is in identifying and proposing a set of indicators and thresholds that can be used to identify that a novelty effect is present. We argue that it is important to focus more on measuring attitudes towards robots that may explain behaviour due to novelty effects. Our findings also suggest research should focus more on verifying whether real user needs are met.
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Acknowledgements
This research was (partially) funded by the Hybrid IntelligenceCenter, a 10-year programme funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science through the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, grant number 024.004.022, and the RAAK-mkb project De toegevoegde waarde van sociale robotsvoor mijn winkel funded by the Taskforce for Applied Research SIA.
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Reimann, M., van de Graaf, J., van Gulik, N., van de Sanden, S., Verhagen, T., Hindriks, K. (2024). Social Robots in the Wild and the Novelty Effect. In: Ali, A.A., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14454. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8718-4_4
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