Abstract
This research investigates consequences of robots’ facial shape in human-robot interactions. More pre-cisely, we draw on a topic from social psychology – the facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR). As prior research shows, wider faces (i.e., faces with high fWHR) of both humans and nonhuman entities are perceived as more dominant and physically imposing. Accordingly, we assume that individuals per-ceive humanoid robots with a higher fWHR (i.e., with a wider face) as more dominant than robots with lower fWHR (i.e., with a narrower face), resulting in increased compliance to recommendations given by robots with higher fWHR. An initial laboratory experiment revealed a significant relationship be-tween robot’s fWHR and humans’ propensity to follow recommendations given by robots in such a way that humans tend to behave significantly more compliant to the recommendation given by a repre-sentation of a humanoid robot when the face of the robot has a high (vs. low) fWHR.
Recommended Citation
Messer, Uwe; Wölfl, Steffen; and Feste, Jasmin Maria, (2019). "ON THE ROLE OF FACIAL WIDTH-TO-HEIGHT RATIO OF HUMANOID ROBOTS FOR HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTIONS". In Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Stockholm & Uppsala, Sweden, June 8-14, 2019. ISBN 978-1-7336325-0-8 Research-in-Progress Papers.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2019_rip/9