Shaping Gestures to Shape Personality: Big-Five Traits, Godspeed Scores and the Similarity-Attraction Effect

This paper explores the role of personality as a mediation variable between observable behaviour of a robot — in this case, gestures of different energy and spatial extension — and the experience of its users according to the Godspeed questionnaire, a standard instrument for gathering subjective ratings of human-robot interaction. The results show that the personality traits that the users attribute to a robot are, to a certain extent, predictive of the subjective scores, i.e., of the quality of the interaction they have with it. Furthermore, the experiments show that 15 of the 30 observers involved in the experiments tend to like the robot more when they attribute traits to it that more similar to their own. The observation that only part of the observers display such a tendency — known as similarityattraction effect — might explain why previous investigations of the same phenomenon have provided contradictory results