Lack of Effort or Lack of Ability? Robot Failures and Human Perception of Agency and Responsibility

Abstract

Research on human interaction has shown that attributing agency to another agent has substantial consequences for the way we perceive and evaluate its actions. Specifically, considering an agent's actions related to either effort or ability can have important consequences for the attribution of responsibility. This study indicates that participants' interpretation of a robot failure in terms of effort -as opposed to abilitysignificantly increases their attribution of agency and -to some extent-moral responsibility to the robot. However a robot displaying lack of effort does not lead to the level of affective and behavioural reactions of participants normally found in reactions to other human agents.

Understanding and Resolving Failures in Human-Robot Interaction: Literature Review and Model Development

“…Almost all errors researched in the literature exemplified technical failures (e.g., Gieselmann, 2006 ; Kim and Hinds, 2006 ; Gieselmann and Ostendorf, 2007 ; Spexard et al, 2008 ; Kim et al, 2009 ; Groom et al, 2010 ; Lee et al, 2010 ; Takayama et al, 2011 ; Desai et al, 2012 , 2013 ; Kahn et al, 2012 ; Rosenthal et al, 2012 ; Shiomi et al, 2013 ; Yasuda and Matsumoto, 2013 ; Kaniarasu and Steinfeld, 2014 ; Lohan et al, 2014 ; Cha et al, 2015 ; Gehle et al, 2015 ; Giuliani et al, 2015 ; Gompei and Umemuro, 2015 ; Hamacher, 2015 ; Knepper et al, 2015 ; Mirnig et al, 2015 , 2017 ; Mubin and Bartneck, 2015 ; Salem et al, 2015 ; Bajones et al, 2016 ; Brooks et al, 2016 ; Hamacher et al, 2016 ; Hayes et al, 2016 ; Ragni et al, 2016 ; Robinette et al, 2016 ; Engelhardt and Hansson, 2017 ; Law et al, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ; van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ; Kwon et al, 2018 ). Only a few evaluated the impact of social norm violations (e.g., Short et al, 2010 ; Salem et al, 2013 ; Giuliani et al, 2015 ; Mirnig et al, 2015 , 2017 ; van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ), and none focused on human errors. Some articles did not specify the type of error used (e.g., Ross et al, 2004 ; Cassenti, 2007 ).…”

“…A robot's failure symptoms in the literature include the robot not completing a given task (e.g., Takayama et al, 2011 ; Rosenthal et al, 2012 ; Brooks et al, 2016 ; Robinette et al, 2016 ; Mirnig et al, 2017 ; Kwon et al, 2018 ), running into obstacles (e.g., Brooks et al, 2016 ), performing the wrong action (e.g., Kim et al, 2009 ; Lee et al, 2010 ; Desai et al, 2012 , 2013 ; Yasuda and Matsumoto, 2013 ; Kaniarasu and Steinfeld, 2014 ; Gehle et al, 2015 ; Mubin and Bartneck, 2015 ; Salem et al, 2015 ; Brooks et al, 2016 ; Hayes et al, 2016 ; Robinette et al, 2016 ; Mirnig et al, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ; van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ), performing the right action incorrectly or incompletely (e.g., Takayama et al, 2011 ; Shiomi et al, 2013 ; Cha et al, 2015 ; Hamacher, 2015 ; Brooks et al, 2016 ; Hamacher et al, 2016 ; Adubor et al, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ; van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ; Kwon et al, 2018 ), producing no action or speech (irresponsiveness) (e.g., Gieselmann, 2006 ; Lohan et al, 2014 ; Bajones et al, 2016 ; Robinette et al, 2016 ; Lucas et al, 2017 , 2018 ), timing speech improperly (e.g., Mirnig et al, 2017 ), failing to produce speech (e.g., Gieselmann and Ostendorf, 2007 ; Mirnig et al, 2017 ), producing inappropriate speech or erroneous instruction (e.g., Gieselmann, 2006 ; Gieselmann and Ostendorf, 2007 ; Short et al, 2010 ; Gehle et al, 2015 ; Gompei and Umemuro, 2015 ; Lucas et al, 2017 , 2018 ; Mirnig et al, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ), repeating s...…”

“…Error recovery strategies and reactions to errors have been evaluated using surveys (e.g., Lee et al, 2010 ; Takayama et al, 2011 ; Cha et al, 2015 ; Brooks et al, 2016 ; Adubor et al, 2017 ; Kim et al, 2017 ; Rossi et al, 2017b ; van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ; Kwon et al, 2018 ), video analysis of HRIs (e.g., Giuliani et al, 2015 ; Mirnig et al, 2015 ), and unstructured observational studies (e.g., Gieselmann, 2006 ; Gehle et al, 2015 ), however most studies used controlled user experiments (e.g., Spexard et al, 2008 ; Short et al, 2010 ; Desai et al, 2013 ; Salem et al, 2013 , 2015 ; Gompei and Umemuro, 2015 ; Knepper et al, 2015 ; Hayes et al, 2016 ; Ragni et al, 2016 ; Robinette et al, 2016 ; Mirnig et al, 2017 ; Lucas et al, 2018 ). One study introduced an idea on how to improve situation awareness (SA; see Comprehension and Memory section) in erroneous situations without any formal evaluation (Cassenti, 2007 ).…”

“…User perceptions of the robot that have been evaluated in erroneous situations include the robot's perceived agency (Lemaignan et al, 2015 ; van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ), predictability (van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ), apologeticness (Shiomi et al, 2013 ), moral accountability (Kahn et al, 2012 ), friendliness (Groom et al, 2010 ; Shiomi et al, 2013 ; Kim et al, 2017 ), propensity to damage (van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ), trustworthiness (Gompei and Umemuro, 2015 ; Brooks et al, 2016 ; Hamacher et al, 2016 ; Rossi et al, 2017a ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ; van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ; Kwon et al, 2018 ), likeability (Groom et al, 2010 ; Salem et al, 2013 ; Bajones et al, 2016 ; Engelhardt and Hansson, 2017 ; Mirnig et al, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ), reliability (Short et al, 2010 ; Salem et al, 2015 ), familiarity (Gompei and Umemuro, 2015 ), anthropomorphism (Lee et al, 2010 ; Salem et al, 2013 , 2015 ; Lemaignan et al, 2015 ; Mubin and Bartneck, 2015 ; Mirnig et al, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ), animacy (Engelhardt and Hansson, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ), technical competence (Groom et al, 2010 ; Short et al, 2010 ; Desai et al, 2013 ; Salem et al, 2015 ; Brooks et al, 2016 ; Engelhardt and Hansson, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ), dependability (Brooks et al, 2016 ), intelligence (Mubin and Bartneck, 2015 ; Salem et al, 2015 ; Bajones et al, 2016 ; Engelhardt and Hansson, 2017 ; Mirnig et al, 2017 ; Sarkar et al, 2017 ), belligerence (Groom et al, 2010 ) and safety (Salem et al, ...…”

“…The quality of error recovery and communication strategies have been evaluated using various performance metrics, including whether users managed to resolve the problems (Spexard et al, 2008 ), attribution of blame (Kim and Hinds, 2006 ), the frequency of use of recovery feature (Spexard et al, 2008 ), the number of error-free user interactions (Gieselmann and Ostendorf, 2007 ; Knepper et al, 2015 ), time per repair (Rosenthal et al, 2012 ; Knepper et al, 2015 ; van der Woerdt and Haselager, 2017 ), time until task completion (De Visser and Parasuraman, 2011 ; Rosenthal et al, 2012 ; Schütte et al, 2017 ), user comfort (Engelhardt and Hansson, 2017 ), user satisfaction (Gieselmann and Ostendorf, 2007 ; Shiomi et al, 2013 ), task performance and completion (Gieselmann and Ostendorf, 2007 ; De Visser and Parasuraman, 2011 ; Desai et al, 2013 ; Salem et al, 2013 ; Knepper et al, 2015 ; Brooks, 2017 ; Schütte et al, 2017 ), workload (Brooks, 2017 ), confidence (De Visser and Parasuraman, 2011 ; Brooks, 2017 ), comprehension of information (Brooks, 2017 ; Kwon et al, 2018 ), the number of times participant had to stop their primary task to handle the robot (Brooks, 2017 ), trust in robot (De Visser and Parasuraman, 2011 ; Rosenthal et al, 2012 ; Hamacher et al, 2016 ), the participant's emotional state (Groom et al, 2010 ) and their influence on user impressions of the robot (Groom et al, 2010 ; Shiomi et al, 2013 ; Bajones et al, 2016 ; Engelhardt and Hansson, 2017 ; Kwon et al, 2018 ). Brooks ( 2017 ) devised a measurement scale of people's reaction to failure called the REACTION scale, which claims to compare different failure situations based on the severity of the failures, the context risk involved, and effectiveness of recovery strategy.…”