The Effect of Social Robots' Listening Behaviors on Animacy, Likeability and Perceived Intelligence

People respond more positively to anthropomorphic social robots that possess humanlike appearance, behaviors or interaction. To enhance human-robot interaction it is necessary to investigate and understand how people perceive such humanistic behaviors. This study explored the influence of humanlike-listening behavior of social robots on participants' perception of the robots. We compared three different listening behaviors including; active listening, active empathic listening, and verbal-only empathic listening, and evaluated the effect of each behavior on participants' perception of social robots in terms of animacy, likeability and perceived intelligence. We focused on emotional-verbal and nonverbal aspects of listening behaviors. The results indicated that a social robot with active-empathic listening behavior is perceived higher than a social robot with active listening behavior in terms of animacy, likeability and perceived intelligence. However, nonverbal aspects of listening behavior did not significantly influence the perception of the robot, when emotional-verbal behaviors were present. Furthermore, emotional-verbal behaviors of listening were more closely associated with perceived intelligence, while nonverbal behaviors affected animacy and likeability.