Existential Crisis: A Social Robot's Reason for Being

Abstract: As Robots become ever more important in our daily lives there's growing need for understanding how they're perceived by people. This study aims to investigate how the user perception of robots is influenced by displays of personality. Using LLMs and speech to text technology, we designed a within-subject study to compare two conditions: a personality-driven robot and a purely task-oriented, personality-neutral robot. Twelve participants, recruited from Socially Intelligent Robotics course at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, interacted with a robot Nao tasked with asking them a set of medical questions under both conditions. After completing both interactions, the participants completed a user experience questionnaire measuring their emotional states and robot perception using standardized questionnaires from the SRI and Psychology literature.