Personality has been identified as a vital factor in understanding the quality of human robot interactions. Despite this the research in this area remains fragmented and lacks a coherent framework. This makes it difficult to understand what we know and identify what we do not. As a result our knowledge of personality in human robot interactions has not kept pace with the deployment of robots in organizations or in our broader society. To address this shortcoming, this paper reviews 83 articles and 84 separate studies to assess the current state of human robot personality research. This review: (1) highlights major thematic research areas, (2) identifies gaps in the literature, (3) derives and presents major conclusions from the literature and (4) offers guidance for future research.
Robots --technologies that can sense, reason and respond to their environments through embodied actions --are being used in new domains to both replace and complement humans (You and Robert 2018;You, Kim, Lee, Kamat, Robert,2018). This means robots are interacting with an organization's employees and in some cases directly interacting with their customers. The need for robots to directly interact with humans has led many researchers to identify factors that promote human-robot interaction. Personality has been identified as a vital factor in understanding the nature and quality of human-robot interactions (Gockley and Matarić 2006;Goetz and Kiesler 2002;Robert 2018;Syrdal, Dautenhahn, Woods, Walters, and Koay 2007). What is personality? Personality comprises someone's past behaviors, cognitions and emotions derived from both biological and social factors (Hall and Lindzey 1957). Why would scholars turn to personality to understand human-robot interaction? To answer these questions, this volume turns to the organizational behavior and social psychology literature on personality. However, given the paper's focus on personality as it relates to human-robot interaction, the discussion will be brief.
Theories of personality assert that individual human traits can be used to predict human emotions, cognitions and behaviors (Peeters et al. 2006). “Personality traits” is a label to describe a specific set of characteristics that are believed to be the best predictors of an individual’s behavior (Tasa, Sears and Schat 2011). Personality is now considered a core construct in understanding human behavior over and above many other factors (Li, Barrick, Zimmerman and Chiaburu 2014). More important, personality explains the way people respond to others in social settings (Thoresen, Kaplan, Barsky, Warren, de Chermont et al. 2003). This is why personality influences the quality of interactions between individuals (Driskell, Goodwin, Salas, and O’Shea 2006;Peeters et al. 2006). The literature on personality is rich in theory and spans disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and political science as well as organizational behavior.
Although there are many types of personality traits, the Big Five are held in particularly high regard. The Big Five personality traits are the most widely used personality traits (Li et al. 2014). The acronym OCEAN, representing openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, is often used to represent the five personality traits. Openness to experience represents the degree to which someone is imaginative, curious, and broadminded (McCrae and Costa 1997). Conscientiousness reflects the extent that someone is careful, deliberative and self-aware of their actions (Tasa et al. 2011). Extraversion is the extent to which an individual is assertive, outgoing, talkative, and sociable (Rhee, Parent and Basu 2013). Introversion is the degree to which someone enjoys being alone and is the opposite of extraversion (Driskell et al. 2006). Agreeableness reflects the extent to which someone is cooperative and friendly (Peeters et al. 2006). Neuroticism can be viewed as the degree to which someone is easily angered, not well-adjusted, insecure, and lacks self-confidence (Driskell et al. 2006). Neuroticism is often viewed as the opposite of emotional stability, which is the degree to which someone is calm, well-adjusted, secure, and self-confident (Peeters et al. 2006). The Big Five are not only the most popular set of personality traits in social sciences, but, as we demonstrate here, they are also the most popular traits used in the study of human-robot interaction (Robert 2018).
Despite the importance of personality in the HRI literature, the research remains fragmented and lacks a coherent framework. This makes it difficult to understand what we know and identify what we do not. As a result, our knowledge of personality in human-robot interactions has not kept pace with the deployment of robots in organizations or in our broader society. As robots become increasingly vital to our society, there is a need to better comprehend factors such as personality that facilitate better human-robot interaction (HRI).
To address this shortcoming, this paper reviews the literature on personality and embodied physical action (EPA) robots. We focused on EPA robots because their physical embodiment invokes strong emotional reactions that can lead individuals to project personalities onto them (Robert 2018;You and Robert 2018). Therefore, issues related to personality are likely to be more central to human-robot interaction with regard to EPA robots. This paper investigates the current state of human-robot personality research, discusses the unique role of personality in human-robot research, and offers guidance for future research.
This review offers several contributions to the literature. First, it presents a conceptual integrated model of the literature on personality in h
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