Robot swarms that move slowly and keep their distance get rated as more competent and likable than swarms that actually finish tasks faster.
April 23, 2026
Original Paper
Warmth and Competence in the Swarm: Designing Effective Human-Robot Teams
arXiv · 2604.19270
The Takeaway
Human teammates value the perceived social personality of a robot swarm more than its technical efficiency. Participants in this study preferred swarms that broadcasted their presence for longer periods and maintained specific separation distances. These behaviors create an impression of warmth and intelligence that makes people feel more comfortable during collaboration. Most engineers focus on optimizing speed and accuracy to make machines useful to humans. This preference shows that social perception governs how well robots are accepted in a workplace regardless of their actual performance stats.
From the abstract
As groups of robots increasingly collaborate with humans, understanding how humans perceive them is critical for designing effective human-robot teams. While prior research examined how humans interpret and evaluate the abilities and intentions of individual agents, social perception of robot teams remains relatively underexplored. Drawing on the competence-warmth framework, we conducted two studies manipulating swarm behaviors in completing a collective search task and measured the social perce