Relying on a large corpus of natural interactions between visitors and a robot in a museum setting, we study a recurrent practice through which humans "worked" to maintain the robot as a competent participant: the description by bystanders, in a way that was made accessible to the main speaker, of the social action that the robot was taken to be accomplishing. Doing so, bystanders maintained the robot's (sometimes incongruous) behaviour as relevant to the activity at hand and preserved the robot itself as a competent participant. Relying on these data, we argue that ex ante definitions of a robot as "social" (i.e. before any interaction occurred) run the risk of naturalizing as self-evident the observable result from micro-sociological processes: namely, the interactional work of co-present humans through which the robot's conduct is reconfigured as contextually relevant.

翻译：基于博物馆场景中游客与机器人之间的大量自然交互语料，本研究分析了一种反复出现的人类实践：旁观者以主要说话者可理解的方式，描述机器人正在完成的社会行为，从而"努力"将机器人维持为合格的交互参与者。通过这种实践，旁观者将机器人（有时不协调的）行为维持为当前活动的相关组成部分，并保护机器人作为合格参与者的地位。基于这些数据，我们认为，将机器人预先定义为"社会性"存在（即在任何交互发生之前）存在风险：这种定义可能将微观社会学过程产生的可观察结果自然化为不言而喻的事实——即在场人类通过交互实践，将机器人的行为重新配置为具有情境相关性的过程。