Towards transferability of theories on prosocial behavior from Social Psychology to HRI

Abstract

This paper describes the transfer of theories on prosocial behavior from Social Psychology to human-robot interaction (HRI) in terms of helpfulness shown by humans towards a robot. Theoretical foundations are given, and relevant influence factors for prosocial behavior are defined. The paper provides an overview on how these factors can be transferred to HRI and are implemented in two experimental settings. In a first experiment, situational empathy towards a robot is increased. In a second experiment, similarity is induced by means of emotional adaption to the mood of the user. Results show that helpfulness towards a robot can be increased by this approach, thus, re-evaluating the transferability of theories from Social Psychology to HRI.

Increasing Helpfulness towards a Robot by Emotional Adaption to the User

“…As a first step, in order to evaluate the presented integrated approach including both components, the combination of implicit and explicit emotional adaption (full emotional adaption condition) has been evaluated in comparison to a non-adaptive condition. As reported earlier, the results showed not only significantly higher helpfulness towards the robot in the full emotional adaption condition than in the non-adaptive comparison group [22], but also significantly higher ratings for the HRI concepts of anthropomorphism and animacy [23]. In order to study the benefits and limitations of the single components of the approach as well as their mutual substitutability, the explicit and implicit emotional control variables are now evaluated in a comparative study as standalone conditions (explicit vs. implicit emotional adaption).…”

“…2.3, incorporated in the developed approach. Regarding the induction of similarity, an evaluative variation of two different persuasive emotional control variables, developed earlier as components of the emotional adaption approach [22,23], is applied. The experimentally evaluated parts of social-psychological predictions and corresponding human target behaviors are marked in gray color in Tab.…”

“…Under fulfilled assumptions, first studies revealed a significant increase in helpfulness towards the robot, as well as raised user-ratings for the concepts of anthropomorphism and animacy in the full emotional adaption condition compared to the non-adaptive condition [22,23]. In this article, a comparative study is introduced, incorporating two new experimental conditions, where emotional adaption is split up into its components.…”