Judging a bot by its cover: An experiment on expectation setting for personal robots

Managing user expectations of personal robots becomes particularly challenging when the end-user just wants to know what the robot can do, and neither understands nor cares about its technical specifications. In describing what a robot can do to such an end-user, we explored the questions of (a) whether or not such users would respond to expectation setting about personal robots and, if so, (b) how such expectation setting would influence human-robot interactions and people´s perceptions of the robots. Using a 2 (expectation setting: high vs. low) x 2 (robot type: Pleo vs. AIBO) between-participants experiment (N = 24), we examined these questions. We found that people´s initial beliefs about the robot´s capabilities are indeed influenced by expectation setting tactics. Contrary to the hypotheses predicted by the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Confirmation Bias, we found that erring on the side of setting expectations lower rather than higher led to less disappointment and more positive appraisals of the robot´s competence.