Social robots can take on the role of a social other in human-robot-interaction, which is similar to, or represents, the way that we interact with other people. Different disciplines and approaches conceptualize this role in a variety of ways.  For example, representationalism holds that robots can be designed to display (stereo-)typically human traits that signify things like gender, race, sexuality, age, class, etc. that directly elicit scripts or produce affordances in the people interacting with them. An important aspect of this approach might see these features as representative of people of a specific group, making the robot into a representation of a member of that group. Alternatively, the sociomorphing approach [4] focuses on how social robots can be de- signed to display features of agency. This approach focuses more on how humans can interact with robots based on the abilities, skills, etc. they perceive robots to be capable of. In contrast to both of these, a fictionalist approach assumes that people interacting with humans construct a narrative in which the robot has a fictional character, which can potentially have traits and capabilities that the material robot doesn’t have or is not even designed to signify.  We discuss these theoretical approaches, the conflicts that arise from them, the related ethical questions, as well as the constraints they pose on robot design. 

A number of recent works call attention to social robot identity performance, the potential for social robots to perform socially salient (human) identity traits like race and gender, and the implications this might have for reinforcing, exacerbating or even challenging social inequities. Whilst critical reflections on this issue are necessary and important, focusing (only/primarily) on human likeness risks neglecting the way in which robots, particularly those that do not have high human likeness, may actually represent specific, individual humans. Empirical work concerning how users perceive service robots, the extent to which they (do not) reflect on the humans such robots represent (think passengers of an autonomous vehicle or teleoperator of a robot shopper) and their (lack of) willingness to treat such robots as social equals when it comes to negotiating incidental interactions indicates human responses to robots may well be driven much more by the robot’s embodiment/social identity performance than any relation to the robot’s level of autonomy or functionality in the context of serving human needs.  Grappling with human representativeness – considering both the human likeness and the human representation issue represents a challenge for HRI designers. How can different approaches to “robots as people” help? 

The capability to engage in conversation is the hallmark of our species and possibly an important factor for a machine to be considered a social other. In contrast to the recent advances in text-based natural language processing in the form of large language models, embodied, multimodal speech-based interaction relies on rapid interpersonal processes. These processes, at times, include the mutual prediction of each partner's wants, beliefs, and knowledge - a theory of mind of sorts - as well as robust repair processes that help to create and maintain the common ground between speakers. Some of these processes appear to be automatic or semi-automatic, indicating that not everything that happens in conversations is under conscious control.  While research into the exact details and technical implementation of these processes is still in its early stages, we have found indications that a human interactor's perception of a robot at least partially hinges on whether a robot can engage in these processes at the required speed. -- In this talk, I will present some examples of such interactions and the "pull" that a timely and appropriate response exerts on the human interactor. -- From a more theoretical perspective, the presented observations are broadly in support of Seibt's, Vestergaard's, and Damholdt's proposal to occasionally replace references to anthropomorphization with the notion of sociomorphing when explaining a person's apparent attribution of social qualities to a robot. Where anthropomorphization requires conscious and slow high-level cognitive processes, sociomorphing as a variant of direct perception may be automatic, fast, and sub- or preconscious.