GROUND23: advancing GROup UNderstanding and robots' aDaptive behavior Paradise Hotel Busan, South Korea, August 28, 2023

As social and cognitive robots become increasingly integrated into our daily lives and are introduced into multi-party contexts such as schools, care facilities, and workplaces, it is crucial to ensure that their behavior considers the complex social dynamics present in these scenarios. However, studying group dynamics in HRI entails inherent challenges from both a technical (e.g., tracking multiple users simultaneously) and a theoretical point of view (e.g., modeling multiple agents who dynamically influence each other). New challenges, therefore, await the HRI community, such as ensuring that social robots can adapt to the needs of individual group members while also considering the group as a whole, susceptible to subtle and hidden social norms and balances. Furthermore, it is crucial that robots do not exhibit biases or unethical behavior in these contexts, eventually leading to negative consequences such as social exclusion. One possible approach to overcome these challenges is through experimental designs based on gamification. This approach can favor an unbiased way of behaving in laboratory experiments, mitigating the Hawthorne effect (i.e., the variations in behavior due to the presence of an observer). Participants are invited to share innovative strategies for exploring group-robot interactions, with approaches focused on - but not limited to – gamification, providing a fresh and insightful viewpoint to (1) using social robots for understanding group dynamics; (2) designing social agents able to interact with groups. Additionally, the discussion will involve the ethical implications of researching group dynamics, including potential negative outcomes such as biases toward group members.