Mindless Robots get Bullied

Abstract

Humans recognise and respond to robots as social agents, to such extent that they occasionally a empt to bully a robot. e current paper investigates whether aggressive behaviour directed towards robots is in uenced by the same social processes that guide human bullying behaviour. More speci cally, it measured the e ects of dehumanisation primes and anthropomorphic qualities of the robot on participants' verbal abuse of a virtual robotic agents. Contrary to previous ndings in human-human interaction, priming participants with power did not result in less mind a ribution. However, evidence for dehumanisation was still found, as the less mind participants a ributed to the robot, the more aggressive responses they gave. In the main study this e ect was moderated by the manipulations of power and robot anthropomorphism; the low anthropomorphic robot in the power prime condition endured signi cantly less abuse, and mind a ribution remained a signi cant predictor for verbal aggression in all conditions save the low anthropomorphic robot with no prime. It is concluded that dehumanisation occurs in human-robot interaction and that like in human-human interaction, it is linked to aggressive behaviour. Moreover, it is argued that this dehumanisation is di erent from anthropomorphism as well as human-human dehumanisation, since anthropomorphism itself did not predict aggressive behaviour and dehumanisation of robots was not in uenced by primes that have been established in human-human dehumanisation research.

Teaching Robots a Lesson: Determinants of Robot Punishment

“…If humans automatically see robots as social beings, including assigning them a moral status, then why do they get aggressive to robots in the wild? It has been suggested that the consequences of the recognition of robots as social agents extend to the field of robot abuse [5,34,54]. Because a robot is perceived as a social agent, aggression towards robots might be predicted by the same factors that drive aggression between humans.…”

“…The current research contributes by combining findings from humanhuman aggression studies with HRI research on the effect of attitudes on negative behaviour. More specifically, by extending previous work on robot abuse [34] we identified and empirically tested four factors that might play a role in robot aggression: the power of the users over the robot, the perceived threat of robots, the robot's embodiment, and the user's attribution of mind towards the robot.…”

The virtual and the physical: two frames of mind

“…In the physical frame, the unscripted environment opens up possibilities for exploration, and affordances invite action. The literature on human-robot interaction is rife with reports of children and adults engaging with robots in ways that are unexpected by the designers of these systems, such as bullying Keijsers and Bartneck (2018) and abusing Nomura et al. (2016) the robot as well personalizing Sauppé and Mutlu (2015) and attributing preferences Lee et al.…”

The morality of abusing a robot

“…To overcome these problems, researchers have resorted to less destructive forms of abuse with more sophisticated robots. For instance, robot bullying has been operationalised as reducing a robot's electrical power supply [4,19] or using abusive language [5]. Using the framework of Game Theory, robots have also been withheld points or money [31].…”

“…One approach to understanding robot bullying has been to experimentally study what makes people aggressive towards robots [4][5][6]. However, experiments designed so, i.e.…”