Should we love robots? – The most liked qualities of companion dogs and how they can be implemented in social robots

Should we love robots? – The most liked qualities of companion dogs and how they can be implemented in social robots. Veronika Konok et al. Computers in Human Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.002

Highlights
•    people’s attitude toward dogs is better than toward robots
•    having emotions, personality and showing attachment are the main advantages of dogs
•    respondents show high agreement about the behavioral manifestation of preferred qualities
•    we give a behavioral protocol for roboticists to design social robots

Abstract

In the future, robots may live with users as long-term companions, thus it is important that some sort of attachment relationship develop between humans and agents. Man’s best friend the dog provides a model for investigating what makes a heterospecific companion a lovable social partner.

Thus, we studied people’s attitudes toward dogs and robots comparatively, with a special focus on those features in dogs that cause people to accept them in their homes and love them. Additionally, we explored from what kind of behaviors people infer these qualities.

We found that people’s attitude toward robots is much more negative than towards dogs. Having emotions, personality and showing attachment were the most frequently reported advantages of dogs. Respondents showed high agreement about the behavioral manifestation of these qualities, which are necessary for engineers to be able to implement such advantages into the social robots’ programs.

Based on our results, in the future roboticists may supply social robots with these preferred qualities, which will aid in the designing of successful social robots.

Keywords: human-robot interaction; dog; robot; attitudes; ethorobotics

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When owners were asked about what they like least about their dog (Q4), the most frequent responses were stubbornness (28%), aggression (19%) and barking (10%). Interestingly, none of the owners would replace their own dogs with one from the same breed, age and sex, which is free from the unwanted features (Q5).