The “Social” of the Socially Interactive Robot: Rethinking Human-Robot Interaction Through Ethnomethodology

Abstract

As social robots project socially interactive skills including speech and gestures, they are in a position to project normative practices that humans ordinarily rely upon in their everyday interactions with each other. Social robots enable experiences that are reducible to interaction as a normative practice, such as a sense of moral obligation to respond to a robot’s greeting. This may have consequences both for the user experience and the design of social robots that are currently overlooked. We propose that theoretical-methodological tools from ethnomethodology should be applied to evaluate and investigate the experiences related to social interaction with social robots.