Social robot advisors: effects of robot judgmental fallacies and context

Abstract

The role of social robots as advisors for decision making is investigated. We examined how robot advisors, one with logical reasoning and one with cognitive fallacies, affected participants' decision making under different contexts. The participants were asked to make multiple decisions, while advice from both robots interleaved the decision making process. Participants had to choose which robot they agreed with, and in the end of the scenario, rank the possible options presented to them. After the interaction, participants were asked to assign roles to the robots, e.g. detective, bartender. Our results show that the robots had an effect on the participants' responses, wherein participants changed their decisions based on the robot they agreed with more. Moreover, the context, presented as two different scenarios, also had an effect on preferred robots, wherein an art auction scenario resulted in significantly increased agreement with the fallacious robot, whereas a detective scenario did not. Finally, personality traits, e.g. agreeableness and neuroticism, and attitudes towards robots, had an impact on which robot was assigned to these roles. Taken together, the results presented here shows that social robot's effects on participants' decision making are a complex interaction between context, robots' cognitive fallacies and participants' attitudes and personalities, and could not be considered as a single psychological construct.

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

“… 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 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 , 43 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 …”

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

“…[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.…”

Knowledge cues to human origins facilitate self-disclosure during interactions with chatbots

“…These findings are conflicted and may be subject to unaddressed factors such as perceived animacy and embodiment. The information conveyed by the agent should not only consider the topic's sensitivity, but also be logical and free from fallacies (57), moral and attentive (58), all the while maintaining consistency with its physical or virtual representation (12; 30).…”