The paper spells out the rationale for developing means of manipulating and of measuring people’s sense of commitment to robot interaction partners. A sense of commitment may lead people to be patient when a robot is not working smoothly, to remain vigilant when a robot is working so smoothly that a task becomes boring, and to increase their willingness to invest effort in teaching a robot. We identify a range of contexts in which a sense of commitment to robot interaction (...) partners may be particularly important. (shrink)