Abstract
The research community of human-robot interaction relies on theories and phenomena from the social sciences in order to study and validate robotic developments in interaction. These studies mainly concerned one (human) on one (robot) interactions in the past. The present paper shifts the attention to groups and group dynamics and reviews relevant concepts from the social sciences: ingroup identification (I), cohesion (C) and entitativity (E). Ubiquitous robots will be part of larger social settings in the near future. A conceptual framework, the I–C–E framework, is proposed as a theoretical foundation for group (dynamics) research in HRI. Additionally, we present methods and possible measures for these relevant concepts and outline topics for future research.
Highlights
The field of human-robot interaction (HRI) has developed over the last 20–30 years [73]
Most research has addressed technical challenges to enable robots to identify, keep track of and attend to multiple humans in interactions. It has been researched in online studies and in interaction studies how humans perceive and evaluate robot groups and whether humans tend to prefer robots that were marked as ingroup members
In the last section of this paper, we discuss from which perspectives the concepts can be assessed and which methods are adequate to measure the concept, because a clearly differentiated theoretical underpinning and well-planned operationalization of studied constructs are of great importance for the HRI community
Summary
The field of human-robot interaction (HRI) has developed over the last 20–30 years [73]. Studies in this field often involve a human participant and the robot, as an interaction partner. Considering potential, ubiquitous deployments of embodied robots and their integration in daily future life, the scenario of one human and one robot interacting with each other in isolation will be unrealistic in most of the deployment scenarios. Research in the field of social psychology investigating human groups shows that group-level processes are fundamentally different from individual-level processes. In consideration of findings from group dynamics research and the likely event of robots playing a part in social settings in the near future, research on robots and groups is necessary. Groups that interact with robots or robot groups are seldom studied, the need for a paradigm shift has been acknowledged [29,44]
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