Human-Robot Cooperation in Economic Games: People Show Strong Reciprocity but Conditional Prosociality Toward Robots

Beyond human-likeness: Socialness is more influential when attributing mental states to robots

“…62–67 However, the extent to which an agent is perceived as “like-me” extends beyond physical form, capabilities, and movement, and growing evidence supports that prior knowledge about and the perceived socialness of a robot may more strongly influence their reception (and people’s ability to collaborate or cooperate with them in an intuitive manner) in social settings. 41,44,68–73…”

“…This finding is consistent with participant qualitative perceptions and behavioural ratings of this same robot in recently published work. 44,45 For example, in one scenario from our study, when the mechanoid robot lost the RPS series, it pouted and slammed its forklift on the table while moving around in circles in protest. Whereas, when the humanoid robot lost, it responded similarly to the human in a more measured manner, by lowering its arms and shaking its head and/or looking down in defeat.…”

“…[62][63][64][65][66][67] However, the extent to which an agent is perceived as "like-me" extends beyond physical form, capabilities, and movement, and growing evidence supports that prior knowledge about and the perceived socialness of a robot may more strongly influence their reception (and people's ability to collaborate or cooperate with them in an intuitive manner) in social settings. 41,44,[68][69][70][71][72][73] A few neuroimaging studies have investigated how these top-down knowledge cues and bottom-up stimulus cues influence perceptions of animacy and the flexibility of our social cognitive system. One study found that stimulus cues overrode knowledge cues to animacy 74 ; whereas, others found the inverse, knowledge, not stimulus, cues more strongly influenced animacy perception.…”