Should we love robots? - The most liked qualities of companion dogs and how they can be implemented in social robots

In the future, robots may live with users as long-term companions, thus it is important that some sort of attachment relationship develop between humans and agents. Man's best friend the dog provides a model for investigating what makes a heterospecific companion a lovable social partner. Thus, we studied people's attitudes toward dogs and robots comparatively, with a special focus on those features in dogs that cause people to accept them in their homes and love them. Additionally, we explored from what kind of behaviors people infer these qualities. We found that people's attitude toward robots is much more negative than towards dogs. Having emotions, personality and showing attachment were the most frequently reported advantages of dogs. Respondents showed high agreement about the behavioral manifestation of these qualities, which are necessary for engineers to be able to implement such advantages into the social robots' programs. Based on our results, in the future roboticists may supply social robots with these preferred qualities, which will aid in the designing of successful social robots. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.