So Close and Yet So Far: How Embodiment Shapes the Effects of Distance in Remote Collaboration

Technology can facilitate communication across large distances. Although today’s technologies enable partners to convey rich verbal and non-verbal information, past research suggests that geographic distance can still hamper remote collaboration. In this study, we investigate whether a telepresence robot, by offering an embodiment of the user, allows communicators to experience their remote partners as being “really there,” overcoming distance effects. We conducted a two-by-two (distance: on-campus vs. across-the-country; embodiment: video-mediated vs. robot-mediated) between-subjects experiment, assessing collaboration in self-disclosure, persuasion, and negotiation tasks. Results showed that, while local participants viewed their remote partners as more present when communicating via telepresence robot, they also exhibited greater impression management in a self-disclosure task than did participants in video-mediated interactions. Consistent with embodiment helping to overcome geographic distance effects, we found that greater geographic distance had a negative impact on collaboration outcomes when a negotiation task was conducted via video-mediated communication, but not when conducted via robot-mediated communication. We did not observe effects of geographic distance, or interaction effects between embodiment and geographic distance, in the self-presentation and persuasion tasks. These findings suggest that a partner’s embodiment may change how individuals present themselves, and how geographic distance is experienced in remote collaboration, although these effects may vary across types of tasks being conducted remotely.