Social Facilitation with Non-Human Agents: Possible or not?

Abstract

As interactions with non-human agents increase, it is important to understand and predict the consequences of human interactions with them. Social facilitation has a longstanding history within the realm of social psychology and is characterized by the presence of other humans having a beneficial effect on performance on easy tasks and inhibiting performance on difficult tasks. While social facilitation has been shown across task types and experimental conditions with human agents, very little research has examined whether this effect can also be induced by non-human agents and, if so, to what degree the level of humanness and embodiment of those agents influences that effect. In the current experiment, we apply a common social facilitation task (i.e., numerical distance judgments) to investigate to what extent the presence of agents of varying degrees of humanness benefits task performance. Results show a significant difference in performance between easy and difficult task conditions, but show no significant improvement in task performance in the social presence conditions compared to performing the task alone. This suggests that the presence of others did not have a positive effect on performance, at least not when social presence was manipulated via still images. Implications of this finding for future studies, as well as for human-robot interaction are discussed.

Individual Differences in Attitude Toward Robots Predict Behavior in Human-Robot Interaction

“…Similar effects have been demonstrated with artificial agents [7,8]. As has been demonstrated before in other aspects of social cognition [9], embodiment seems to affect the social presence effect, as presence induced by images of social agents did not affect performance [10]. These studies, however, have used fairly simple tasks, such as arithmetic operations, that do not accurately resemble the complexity that characterizes practical applications of robots.…”

Individual differences in attitude toward robots predict behavior in human-robot interaction

“…Similar effects have been demonstrated with artificial agents [7,8]. As has been demonstrated before in other aspects of social cognition [9], embodiment seems to affect the social presence effect, as presence induced by images of social agents did not affect performance [10]. These studies, however, have used fairly simple tasks, such as arithmetic operations, that do not accurately resemble the complexity that characterizes practical applications of robots.…”

Robots As Intentional Agents: Using Neuroscientific Methods to Make Robots Appear More Social

“…Perceiving human features like ‘having a mind’ in non-human agents has also been shown to induce social facilitation effects on human performance ( Bartneck, 2003 ; cf. Hoyt et al, 2003 ; Woods et al, 2005 ; Park and Catrambone, 2007 ; Zanbaka et al, 2007 ; Riether et al, 2012 ; Hertz and Wiese, 2017 ), and to foster learning via social reinforcement ( Druin and Hendler, 2000 ; Robins et al, 2005 ; see Figure 4 ). The facilitatory effect of the presence of an intentional robot on performance becomes even more prominent with an increasing degree of physical embodiment of the robot ( Bartneck, 2003 ; Hoyt et al, 2003 ; Zanbaka et al, 2007 ).…”