Due to the distribution of various deceptive techniques in our daily environments, we must consider a way of educating interaction literacy, i.e., enabling trust calibration and appropriate responsive action through critical thinking and observations of interacting partners. For this purpose, in this study, we conducted an experiment where a social robot deliberately deceives participants under low-risk and non-harmful tasks (such as consent form readings) in both face-to-face and online survey settings, as an analogy of an evacuation drill or inoculation theory. We developed a semi-autonomous robot system where the robot provides information with or without deceptive strategies to attempt to either mislead (with deception) or encourage careful reading (without deception) of the consent form. After the tasks, the participants were informed of the robot’s role and evaluated their impressions of it. Additionally, following the laboratory experiment, participants voluntarily completed a follow-up online survey and participated in a similar consent form reading task online. The experimental results showed that the participants were more deceived due to the robot’s deceptive strategies, but their negative impressions of the robot were limited. Moreover, the participants who were deceived during the first task were also deceived in the second task. This suggests that our approach can be used as a promising method for identifying individuals who are easily deceived by others in non-harmful situations, thus aiding in the development of interaction literacy programs.

Using multiple robots in presentations more effectively attracts customers and provides information to them than a single robot. Many robotics researchers have employed this approach to achieve effective robot-presentation systems in real environments. Although these systems implicitly equalize the amount of speech in the conversational content among multiple robots, it remains unknown whether that strategy is actually important. For example, the effects of the second robot that provides only back-channel responses have not yet been investigated. Unveiling the relationships between the presentation effects and the amount of speech in multiple robot presentations is undoubtedly crucial for designing the content of multiple robots’ conversations. For this purpose, we conducted a video-based web-survey whose findings suggest that using multiple robots for product recommendations increases their commercial attractiveness. The results showed some advantages by equalizing the amount of speech compared to biasing that amount in presentations.

Head-tilting motions are social signals that play a key role in communication. In human-robot interaction, researchers have found that this motion increases the observer’s feelings of kawaii toward a robot. Kawaii is a Japanese word meaning cute and adorable, and the feeling of kawaii refers to such affectionate, tender feelings toward an object. The feeling of kawaii has proven to be crucial for designing socially acceptable robots. However, the impact of the head-tilting speed of social robots on the observer’s kawaii feelings remains unclear because previous research mainly used static images. This study determined the optimal head-tilting speed and direction to deepen the observer’s feeling of kawaii toward a robot. Our findings found that participants reported feeling more kawaii toward a robot when it tilted its head to its right within 0.5 or 1 second. Our results also showed that gestures associated with head tilting are critical for robot behavior design.

Due to the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, such measures as social distancing is being promulgated to reduce community spread. Unfortunately, such steps greatly limit physical touching, and this touch starvation increases people's stress. We address this problem by focusing on touch interactions with oneself: self-touch. We developed a system that consists of a touch sensor and a supportive voice function to encourage self-touch behaviors. We experimentally evaluated whether our developed system increased self-touch behaviors and investigated its stress-buffering effects under stressful settings. The experimental results showed that the system increased self-touch behaviors, although only male participants showed significant stress-buffering effects.