Experimental designs for cross-cultural interactions:A case study on affective body movements for HRI

Culture is not the first aspect that comes to mind when discussing human robot interaction. But our cultural upbringing does to a large degree influence our patterns of behavior and interpretation. Thus, culture is present in the development of robotic systems right from the start, unconsciously influencinghow robots look like, what we envision with them to do, and how they are programmed to interact with the user. In this paper we argue that is is beneficial to make this unconscious influence explicit and take it into account during the development (and evaluation). To this end we present a principled approachof capturing various cultural influences during the development process and exemplify this approach with a case study of affective body movements