Birds of a Feather Flock Together: A Study of Status Homophily in HRI

Homophily, a person's bias for having ties with people who are similar to themselves in social ways, has a vital role in creating a social connection between people. Studying homophily in human-robot interactions can provide valuable insights for improving those interactions. In this paper, we investigate whether similar interests have a positive effect on a human-robot interaction similar to the positive impact it can have on human-human interaction. We explore whether sharing similar interests can affect trust. This experiment consisted of two NAO robots; each gave differing speeches. For each participant, their national origin was asked in the pre-questionnaire, and during the sessions, one of the robot's topics was either personalized or not to their national origin. Since one robot shared a familiar topic, we expected to observe bonding between humans and the robot. We gathered data from a postquestionnaire and analyzed them. The results summarize the hypotheses here. We conclude that homophily plays a significant role in human-robot interaction, affecting trust in a robot partner.