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Ripple effects of an embedded social agent: a field study of a social robot in the workplace

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Prior research has investigated the effect of interactive social agents presented on computer screens or embodied in robots. Much of this research has been pursued in labs and brief field studies. Comparatively little is known about social agents embedded in the workplace, where employees have repeated interactions with the agent, alone and with others. We designed a social robot snack delivery service for a workplace, and evaluated the service over four months allowing each employee to use it for two months. We report on how employees responded to the robot and the service over repeated encounters. Employees attached different social roles to the robot beyond a delivery person as they incorporated the robot's visit into their workplace routines. Beyond one-on-one interaction, the robot created a ripple effect in the workplace, triggering new behaviors among employees, including politeness, protection of the robot, mimicry, social comparison, and even jealousy. We discuss the implications of these ripple effects for designing services incorporating social agents.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2012
    3276 pages
    ISBN:9781450310154
    DOI:10.1145/2207676
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 05 May 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. embodiment
    2. field study
    3. human-robot interaction
    4. longitudinal study
    5. organizational technology
    6. service design
    7. social agent
    8. workplace

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    • (2024)The Power of Advice: Differential Blame for Human and Robot Advisors and Deciders in a Moral Advising ContextProceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610977.3634942(240-249)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
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