The persistence of first impressions: The effect of repeated interactions on the perception of a social robot

Numerous studies in social psychology have shown that familiarization across repeated interactions improves people’s perception of the other. If and how these findings relate to human-robot interaction (HRI) is not well understood, even though such knowledge is crucial when pursuing long-term interactions. In our work, we investigate the persistence of first impressions by asking 49 participants to play a geography game with a robot. We measure how their perception of the robot changes over three sessions with three to ten days of zero exposure in between. Our results show that different perceptual dimensions stabilize within different time frames, with the robot’s competence being the fastest to stabilize and perceived threat the most fluctuating over time. We also found evidence that perceptual differences between robots with varying levels of humanlikeness persist across repeated interactions. This study has important implications for HRI design as it sheds new light on the influence of robots’ embodiment and interaction abilities. Moreover, it also impacts HRI theory as it presents novel findings contributing to research on the uncanny valley and robot perception in general.