Understanding human social interactions with robots is important for designing robots for social tasks. Here, we investigate undergraduate participants’ situational cooperation tendencies towards a robot opponent using prisoner’s dilemma games. With two conditions where incentives for cooperative decisions were manipulated to be high or low, we predicted that people would cooperate more often with the robot in high-incentive conditions. Our results showed incentive structure did not predict human cooperation overall, but did influence cooperation in early rounds, where participants cooperated significantly more in the high-incentive condition. Exploratory analyses revealed other two behavioural tendencies: (1) participants played a tit-for-tat strategy against the robot (whose decisions were random); and (2) participants only behaved prosocially toward the robot when they had achieved high scores themselves. Our findings highlight ways in which social behaviour toward robots might differ from social behaviour toward humans, and inform future work on human–robot interactions in collaborative contexts.

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Intergroup dynamics shape the ways in which we interact with other people. We feel more empathy towards ingroup members compared to outgroup members, and can even feel pleasure when an outgroup member experiences misfortune, known as schadenfreude. Here, we test the extent to which these intergroup biases emerge during interactions with robots. We measured trial-by-trial fluctuations in emotional reactivity to the outcome of a competitive reaction time game to assess both empathy and schadenfreude in arbitrary human-human and human-robot teams. Across four experiments (total n = 361), we observed a consistent empathy and schadenfreude bias driven by team membership. People felt more empathy towards ingroup members than outgroup members and more schadenfreude towards outgroup members. The existence of an intergroup bias did not depend on the nature of the agent: the same effects were observed for human-human and human-robot teams. People reported similar levels of empathy and schadenfreude towards a human and robot player. The human likeness of the robot did not consistently influence this intergroup bias. In other words, similar empathy and schadenfreude biases were observed for both humanoid and mechanoid robots. For all teams, this bias was influenced by the level of team identification; individuals who identified more with their team showed stronger intergroup empathy and schadenfreude bias. Together, we show that similar intergroup dynamics that shape our interactions with people can also shape interactions with robots. Our results highlight the importance of taking intergroup biases into account when examining social dynamics of human-robot interactions.

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