Can robots have personality?
An empirical study of personality manifestation, social responses, and social presence in
human-robot interaction
The rapid development of robotic technology has gone far beyond the traditional
industrial robots which rely on limited human-robot interaction techniques (e.g. hand
controller, graphical user interfaces, etc.) to the recent development of animal-like
entertainment robots. Represented by SONY’s AIBO, the first product of this new generation
of robots, such entertainment robots engage in significant peer-to-peer (human-robot)
interaction and manifest a wide range of social features: “expressing and or perceiving
emotions”, “communicating with high-level dialogue and natural cues (gaze, gesture, etc.)”,
“learning models of other agents” and “displaying personality and character” (Fong &
Nourbakhsh, 2003). Although a number of research on socially interactive robots have
explored the dimensions of emotion, dialogue, and gesture, very few studies focus on the
personality dimension despite its particular importance in human-robot interaction (with the
exception of Miwa, Takanishi, & Takanobu, 2001, and Severinson-Eklundh, Green, &
Huttenrauch, 2003).
This study examines the personality dimension in human-robot interaction. We believe
that personality is an essential feature for creating socially interactive robots and study on this
dimension will facilitate enhance human-robot interaction. Personalities of robots provide
humans with affordance and make it intuitive and natural to model and understand robot
behaviors (Norman, 1990; Hara & Kobayashi, 1995). Personalities of people not only
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Convention