Social robots as media

Robots are poised to play an important role in social life. Surprisingly, to date we know surprisingly little about the psychological, social or emotional responses to robots. We propose a novel robot-as-media theoretical framework for understanding how people perceive robots. We have explored media characteristics, personality and psychological dimensions and social contexts for images of social robots derived from published research over the last decade.

Publications

A picture is (still) worth a thousand words: The impact of appearance and characteristic narratives on people’s perceptions of social robots

Liu, S.X., Arredondo, E., Mieczkowski, H., Hancock, J.T., & Reeves, B. (2019). A picture is (still) worth a thousand words: The impact of appearance and characteristic narratives on people’s perceptions of social robots, 69th Annual International Communication Association Conference, Washington, D.C.