Even after long-term exposures, androids with a strikingly human-like appearance evoke unnatural feelings. The behavior that would induce human-like feelings after long exposures is difficult to determine, and it often depends on the cultural background of the observers. Therefore, in this study, we generate an acting performance system for the android, in which an android and a human interact in a stage play in the real world. We adopt the theatrical theory called Contemporary Colloquial Theatre Theory to give the android natural behaviors so that audiences can comfortably observe it even after long-minute exposure. A stage play is created and shown in various locations, and the audiences are requested to report their impressions of the stage and their cultural and psychological backgrounds in a self-evaluating questionnaire. Overall analysis indicates that the audience had positive feelings, in terms of attractiveness, towards the android on the stage even after 20 min of exposure. The singularly high acceptance of the android by Japanese audiences seems to be correlated with a high animism tendency, rather than to empathy. We also discuss how the stage play approach is limited and could be extended to contribute to realization of human–robot interaction in the real world.

Disclosing personal matters to other individuals often contributes to the maintenance of our mental health and social bonding. However, in face-to-face situations, it can be difficult to prompt others to self-disclose because people often feel embarrassed disclosing personal matters to others. Although artificial agents without strong social pressure for listeners to induce self-disclosure is a promising engineering method that can be applied in daily stress management and reduce depression, gender difference is known to make a drastic difference of the attitude toward robots. We hypothesized that, as compared to men, women tend to prefer robots as a listener for their self-disclosure. The experimental results that are based on questionnaires and the actual self-disclosure behavior indicate that men preferred to self-disclose to the human listener, while women did not discriminate between robots and humans as listeners for their self-disclosure in the willingness and the amount of self-disclosure. This also suggests that the gender difference needs to be considered when robots are used as a self-disclosure listener.

Future service robots mass-produced for practical applications may benefit from having personalities. To engineer robot personalities in significant quantities for practical applications, we need first to identify the personality dimensions on which personality traits can be effectively optimised by minimising the distances between engineering targets and the corresponding robots under construction, since not all personality dimensions are applicable and equally prominent. Whether optimisation is possible on a personality dimension depends on how specific users consider the personalities of a type of robot, especially whether they can provide effective feedback to guide the optimisation of certain traits on a personality dimension. The dimensions may vary from user group to user group since not all people consider a type of trait to be relevant to a type of robot, which our results corroborate. Therefore, we had proposed a test procedure as an engineering tool to identify, with the help of a user group, personality dimensions for engineering robot personalities out of a type of robot knowing its typical usage. It applies to robots that can imitate human behaviour and small user groups with at least eight people. We confirmed its effectiveness in limited-scope tests.