"You Might Like It": How People Respond to Small Talk During Human-Robot Collaboration

Social communication between people and social robots has been studied extensively and found to have various notable benefits, including the enhancement of human-robot team cohesion and the development of rapport and trust. However, the potential of social communication between people and non-social robots, such as non-anthropomorphic robot manipulators commonly used in work settings (\eg warehouse and factory), is less explored and not well established. In this work, we investigate people's engagement and attitudes towards a non-anthropomorphic robot manipulator that initiates small talk during a collaborative assembly task and explore how the presence of negative team feedback may affect team dynamics and blame attribution. Through an in-person study with 20 participants, we observed a response rate of 77.60% in response to the robot's small talk attempts. Nine participants continued engaging with the robot by initiating their own questions, indicating sustained interest in the conversation. However, we also found that the first negative feedback decreased the participants' willingness to extend the conversation. We additionally present participants' initial perceptions of small talk for physical robot manipulators and discuss design implications for integrating small talk into non-social robots, along with various aspects of small talk that may influence physical human-robot interactions.