Not Becoming Friends: Situated Categorization Processes in Child-Robot Interaction

Le résumé fourni par la source

As robots increasingly enter children’s everyday environments, understanding how children categorize and relate to these technologies is central to Human–Robot Interaction (HRI). While traditional HRI approaches often treat social categorization as a cognitive construct assessed at the individual level, this paper shifts the focus to the situated interactional processes through which children collaboratively invoke, reject, and negotiate categorizations in real-time group interaction. Drawing on Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis, we examine a robot-mediated photo-sharing activity involving children from Denmark and Namibia. Our analysis of a single interactional episode shows how children orient to the robot Haru as a mediator while resisting its proposal of friendship. The findings reveal three key challenges for HRI: (1) the robot’s limited responsiveness to turn-taking and interactional trouble, (2) mismatches between the robot’s relational framing and children’s social expectations, and (3) the emergent and locally negotiated nature of participation roles. These insights highlight the need for robot designs that support flexible mediation, context-sensitive relational roles, and collaborative meaning-making, particularly in culturally diverse settings.

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