On the Role of Facial Width-to-Height Ratio of Humanoid Robots for Human-Robot Interactions





Faculty/Professorship: Sales and Marketing  
Author(s): Messer, Uwe; Wölfl, Steffen; Feste, Jasmin
Title of the compilation: ECIS 2019 Proceedings
Corporate Body: Eurpean Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 2019, Stockholm & Uppsala, Sweden
Year of publication: 2019
Pages: 8 ; Online-Ressource
ISBN: 978-1-7336325-0-8
Series ; Volume: Research-in-Progress Papers
Language(s): English
URL: https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2019_rip/9
Abstract: 
This research investigates consequences of robots’ facial shape in human-robot interactions. More precisely, we draw on a topic from social psychology – the facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR). As prior research shows, wider faces (i.e., faces with high fWHR) of both humans and nonhuman enti-ties are perceived as more dominant and physically imposing. Accordingly, we assume that individ-uals perceive humanoid robots with a higher fWHR (i.e., with a wider face) as more dominant than robots with lower fWHR (i.e., with a narrower face), resulting in increased compliance to recom-mendations given by robots with higher fWHR. An initial laboratory experiment revealed a signifi-cant relationship between robot’s fWHR and humans’ propensity to follow recommendations given by robots in such a way that humans tend to behave significantly more compliant to the recommen-dation given by a representation of a humanoid robot when the face of the robot has a high (vs. low) fWHR.
Keywords: Facial width-to-height ratio, Humanoid Robots, Human-Robot Interaction, Recommendations
Peer Reviewed: Ja
International Distribution: Ja
Type: Conferenceobject
URI: https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/45824
Year of publication: 4. July 2019