The Hitchhiker's Guide to a Credible and Socially Present Robot: Two Meta-Analyses of the Power of Social Cues in Human-Robot Interaction

Social cues have been construed as an important concept in human-robot interaction, as they can be manipulated to reflect robots' perceived genders, personalities, emotions, identities, and so on. This study seeks to understand the overall effects of social cues and applies two meta-analyses to explore a hierarchy of social cues that elicits different degrees of users' social responses. A total of 25 and 44 effect sizes were calculated to represent the respective magnitudes of the effects of social cues on users' social presence (N = 2498) and trust in social robots (N = 4147). Results suggested that although the overall effects of social cues were small, manipulating social robots' facial and kinetic cues can induce medium-to-large-sized effects on users' social presence and trust. In addition, the overall positive effect sizes of social cues indicated that designing humanlike, natural, and lifelike cues was effective in evoking users' social presence and trust in social robots. The results of the two meta-analyses can contribute to the theoretical implications of the Computers are Social Actors paradigm and the practical and methodological design of human-robot interaction.