What does it take for people to feel at ease when interacting with AI-powered humanoid robots? How do these encounters affect our emotions and experiences? These questions are at the center of research led by Valentina Fantasia, WASP-HS Assistant Professor and Docent in Cognitive Science at Lund University.
When we interact with other humans, there is often an unconscious coordination of body language, tone of voice, and attitudes — a form of mirroring that creates social closeness. Valentina’s research group has investigated how this type of coordination, known as interpersonal synchrony, works when people meet a humanoid robot in a face-to-face interaction.
“We’ve studied how humans and robots move together, and how their movements become more coordinated over time. This affects both how people feel and how they perceive the robot as a social partner,” says Valentina.
Humans Mirror Humans – Robots Require Time
How a robot looks and moves plays a significant role in how we perceive it. It is not just about having human-like features, but also about how the robot physically behaves.
“The way the robot moves affects how people feel about it, and how easy it is to collaborate with it, in a very fundamental and almost unconscious way,” says Valentina.
The researchers also investigated what it takes for people to adopt the robot’s perspective during interaction. This ability to shift viewpoint is key to experiencing the robot as a social partner — but it doesn’t come naturally.
The study shows that people coordinate their movements more easily with other humans than with robots. While coordination with a human partner remains stable throughout the interaction, coordination with a robot gradually increases over time.
“This suggests that we need time to get used to the robot and begin interacting with it in a natural way. We think this might be partly because it’s harder to match the robot’s movements with our own familiar movement patterns — something that happens automatically between humans,” Valentina explains.
A Critical View of Human–Robot Relationships
Valentina emphasizes the importance of critically considering how robots are designed to influence our emotions, experiences, and power dynamics.
“It’s important that researchers and companies are aware of how the robot’s body and behavior shape our experience. It’s about more than technology – it’s about human relationships.”
From birth, humans learn to understand others as social partners. We interpret actions, emotions, and body language, and respond by coordinating our own movements, feelings, and communication.
“As technology develops, we need to rethink how we relate to emotions, bodies, and mutual interaction when we meet artificial systems. This raises important questions about what we, as humans who naturally see others as having thoughts and feelings, actually do when we interact with machines that seem to behave like us.”
“How can we make sure that the way we project human traits onto AI doesn’t reinforce harmful biases or power structures? Instead, these interactions should help us better understand ourselves — who we are and who we’re becoming,” Valentina concludes.
Learn More
To learn more about interaction with social autonomous systems, feel free to contact Valentina Fantasia, WASP-HS Assistant Professor and Docent in Cognitive Science at Lund University at valentina.fantasia@lucs.lu.se. To read more about the project and the project members, see Interactions with Social Autonomous Systems.
