Feeling committed to a robot: why, what, when and how?

The paper spells out the rationale for developing means of manipulating and of measuring people's sense of commitment to robot interaction partners. A sense of commitment may lead people to be patient when a robot is not working smoothly, to remain vigilant when a robot is working so smoothly that a task becomes boring and to increase their willingness to invest effort in teaching a robot. We identify a range of contexts in which a sense of commitment to robot interaction partners may be particularly important. This article is part of the theme issue 'From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction'.