HRI and Personality Perception: Comparison of the Personality Evaluation of a Teleoperated Humanoid Robot and Human Interlocutor

This paper deals with the personality perception of a humanoid robot when talking to it in a natural manner, using the wizard of Oz. An experiment involving 20 subjects was performed, to compare two heteroevaluation characteristics: identity perception of human vs. humanoid, and identity perception differences when interacting with a human directly or with the same human through the robot mediation. The experiment was organized in three interactions: with a woman, with a man, and with a humanoid robot. The evaluation uses the OCEAN inventory. The results show that the subjects create for the teleoperated robot an identity of its own, which differs from the one attributed to the teleoperator. The robot was generally perceived as having less interest in art, lacking more imagination or ingenuity, being less open-minded than the human controlling it. The perception of emotional stability is greater: the absence of the human envelope allows a person to appear more stable. We identified two statistical groups in the robot evaluation, depending on the consideration of the robotic technology by the subjects: their perception of the robot conscientiousness, extroversion and agreeableness varies according to the subjects, unlike the personality of the teleoperator.