Psychological importance of human agency: How self-assembly affects user experience of robots

Does assembling one's robot enhance the quality of our interaction with it? And, does it matter whether the robot is a utilitarian tool or a socially interactive entity? We examined these questions with a 2 (Assembler: Self vs. Others) x 2 (Expectation Setting/Framing: Task-oriented robot vs. Interaction-oriented robot) between-subjects experiment (N = 80), in which participants interacted with a humanoid desktop robot (KT-Gladiator 19). Results showed that participants tended to have more positive evaluations of both the robot and the interaction process when they set it up themselves, an effect that is positively mediated by a sense of ownership and a sense of accomplishment, and negatively mediated by perceived process costs of setting up the robot. They also tended to evaluate the robot and the interaction more positively when they expected it to be task-oriented rather than interaction-oriented. Implications for theory and design of robots are discussed.