Warning: This Robot is Not What it Seems! Exploring Expectation Discrepancy Resulting from Robot Design

Abstract

People are starting to interact with robots in a range of everyday contexts including hospitals, shopping centers, and airports. When faced with a robot, people with little or no prior experience necessarily build expectations based on the robot's superficial appearances and actions, mediated by any potential tangentially related experience (e.g., media depictions). However, the person's constructed expectations (e.g., that a humanoid robot can hold a conversation) does not necessarily relate to actual robot capability, resulting in an expectation discrepancy. This can create disappointment, when the person notices the limited capability, or misplaced trust, if the person believes a robot is more capable than it is. In this paper we present an initial framework for describing and discussing expectation discrepancy.