When in doubt, lay it out: Over vs. under-accommodation in human-robot interaction

What happens when a social robot attempts to accommodate its communicative behavior towards the human interlocutor? The present experiment seeks to expand understanding of how people evaluate social robots when they (the social robots) engage in cases of over- and under-accommodation during interactions. Additionally, the current study partially replicates and extends earlier work examining nonaccommodation. Results indicated that some relationships between the stereotype content model (warmth and competence) were mediated by perceived accommodation for the evaluation outcomes. Moreover, the social robot in the overaccommodative communication condition was evaluated more positively than the social robot in the underaccommodative communication condition. As such, it is better for a social robot to be considered overaccommodative than underaccommodative.