Project leader: Johanna Seibt, Aarhus University
Project duration: 2021-2024
Participating countries: Sweden, Denmark and Finland
Funding from NordForsk: 14,987,413 NOK
Project website: S-FACTOR
The project S-FACTOR investigated how human groups perform certain tasks when they are guided by a “social robot”, addressing cutting edge issues in the multidisciplinary area of Human-Robot Interaction studies (official abbreviated ‘HRI’). A team of 15 researchers from 7 disciplines conducted a series of experiments to explore whether social robots can facilitate positive group processes. The researchers investigated people’s behavior in interaction with social robots, but also how humans, as groups and individuals, experience these interactions.
Impact story
Results from the project show that inviting a robot into your group can put the group into a positive mood which in turn can boost creativity in cognitive tasks. Like human facilitators, robots can repair participation imbalance in a group and repair trust after having made a mistake. While some HRI experiments have shown that humans follow the authority of a robot in practical emergency situation, the project’s most complex experiment showed that in normal (work-like) situations human retained ‘critical distance’ and followed their dispositions for strategic collaboration.
The project’s overall approach to the development of social robotics applications had special impact on the international research community and received local and national public attention since the project team organized two events.
Key findings
The project’s key findings belong into three categories: 1. empirical results, 2. methodological results, and 3. results of conceptual (ethical) research.
- The way a robot speaks (e.g., charismatic voice) can enhance group creativity but do not seem to enhance trust-in-action for practical tasks. Robots are ‘emotionally contagious’: The (simulated) emotional state (good mood, bad mood) of a facilitation robot puts human group members in a ‘bad mood’/’good mood’. Robot gaze can mediate participation imbalance in groups with different skill levels. Robots can effectively apply human strategies for trust repair (justification, denial, promise to improve). Whether human dispositions for strategic rational collaboration are influenced by advice of an artificial social agent (robot, avatar) is context dependent.
- The researchers advanced the key methodology (sociality analysis) for ISR (i.e., Integrative social robotics; the first R&D paradigm for developing applications of social robotics in human-centered manner): The project introduced and validated a new theoretical construct: “sociomorphing”, to replace the theoretical construct of “anthropomorphizing,” which showed to be inconsistently used in HRI. When humans are sociomorphing a robot, they attribute coordination capacities to the robot, forming partner models and self-models; with these tools one can trace with precision key ethical issues in human-robot interaction (e.g.deception, sentimentalism, debasement).
- Central EU documents for responsible technology development rely on the capacity of institutions taking responsibility. The researchers developed models for distributed responsibility and introduced a generic condition that institutions need to fulfill if they can be held responsible. They clarified the conditions under which robots may be assigned «moral standing.»
Key outputs
Damholdt, M. F., Quick, O. S., Seibt, J., Vestergaard, C. & Hansen, M. 2023. A Scoping Review of HRI Research on ‘Anthropomorphism’: Contributions to the Method Debate in HRI, International Journal of Social Robotics 15, 7, p. 1203-1226 24 p.
Fucinato, K., Niebuhr, O., Nørskov, S., & Fischer, K. 2023. Charismatic speech features in robot instructions enhance team creativity. Frontiers in Communication, 8, [1115360]. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1115360
Romeo M, Torre I, Le maguer S, Sleat A, Cangelosi A, Leite I. (2025). The Effect of Voice and Repair Strategy on Trust Formation and Repair in Human-Robot Interaction.. ACM Transactions of HRI, 14 (2), pp. 22
J. Seibt, R. Hakli, M. Nørskov (eds.), Robophilosophy—Philosophy of, for, and by Social Robotics, MIT Press, 2026.