Robot in Your Intimate Space

Can people allow a social robot to enter their intimate space?

In our modern society, we can easily find social robots providing concierge, delivery, or security services in public spaces. These social robots are able to recognize people near them and physically get closer to people with its mobility. According to Hall(1963), "intimate space" is the region surrounding a person within 1.5 feet which they regard as psychologically theirs. Most people value their personal space and try to keep it safe. We may feel discomfort, anger, or anxiety when the personal space is broken into. Permitting a person to enter the personal space and entering somebody else's personal space are indicators of perception of those people's relationship. An intimate space is reserved for close friends, lovers, children, or close family members. Then how people perceive and react to a social robot in their intimate space?

Related Study

There are two conflicting claims with ontological approach about social robots: strong ontology and weak ontology (Searle et al., 2001). The strong ontological claim is that a robot could replace a human being with advanced technology, whereas the weak ontological claim is that a robot could not replace a human being but remained as an artifact being.

In the field of Human-Robot Interaction, Disalvo et al.(2002) insisted that robots have both characteristics of a robot, humanness and productness:

If robots have humanness dominantly, people would have substantive emotional engagement toward robots and could perceive robots as social beings. In this case, people may want to keep the distance with the robots to save their intimate space and it may feel people discomfort when robots enter into their intimate spaces.
However, if robots has productness dominantly, people would not have substantive emotional engagement toward robots and perceive robots as non-social beings. Then people may allow the robots to get close with them and it won't make them discomfortable when robots come into their intimate spaces.

Study Design

To see the robot’s dominant characteristic, I compared human-robot interaction with human-human / human-product interaction.
3 (communicator types: a human vs. a robot vs. a product) with-in participants experiment design was used (N=30).

Procedure

Participants had physical contact with three communicators in random order. In each condition, participants were asked to put their hands on each communicator’s cheeks and lower their hands when they feel awkwardness or discomfort. After each condition, a questionnaire regarding the stimuli was administered.

Results
People perceived the robot in between the human and the product for social presence, anthropomorphism, animacy, and likeability. However, for the duration of physical contact in intimate space, participants had the longest physical contact with the robot. According to the post-experimental survey and interview, participants regarded the interaction with a human as a stranger’s invasion of their personal space. During the interaction with the product, participants felt the least motivation to continue the interaction because the product was regarded as a non-social/non-living being with no interaction capability. On the other hand, when participants made interactions with a robot, they felt comfortable with continuing the physical contact and also thought that they were involved in the 2-way interaction. Participants perceived that the robot had a lower level of social presence than a human but still, people regarded the robot as a social being that was able to recognize them.

The results show that the robot's humanness would allow the rovot to have a social interaction with people and its productness may reduces people's discomfort toward the robot even within the intimate space. Since the robot's productness is perceived as more dominantly than the humanness, people would be able to have a longer interaction with the robot than with the real person. This implies that: 1) robots may become a great assistant providing physical services for people, 2) Robots would be able to provide physical assistance in very close distances with people effectively without causing users' discomfort.

Related Articles

Baek, Chaehyun, Jung Ju Choi, and Sonya S. Kwak. “Can you touch me?: the impact of physical contact on emotional engagement with a robot.”Proceedings of the second international conference on Human-agent interaction. ACM, 2014.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2658909

Baek, Chaehyun, Jung Ju Choi, and Sonya S. Kwak. “Can I Get Close to You?: the impact of communicator types on people’s acceptance toward a communicator.” Archives of Design Research Vol.28 No.2, 63-72
http://www.aodr.org/_common/do.php?a=current&b=91&bidx=332&aidx=4149