The Trade-off between Interaction Time and Social Facilitation with Collaborative Social Robots

The adoption of social robots and conversational agents is growing at a rapid pace. These agents, however, are still not optimised to simulate key social aspects of situated human conversational environments. Humans are intellectually biased towards social activity when facing more anthropomorphic agents or when presented with subtle social cues. In this paper, we discuss the effects of simulating anthropomorphism and non-verbal social behaviour in social robots and its implications for human-robot collaborative guided tasks. Our results indicate that it is not always favourable for agents to be anthropomorphised or to communicate with nonverbal behaviour. We found a clear trade-off between interaction time and social facilitation when controlling for anthropomorphism and social behaviour