Vulnerable robots positively shape human conversational dynamics in a human–robot team

Abstract

Social robots are becoming increasingly influential in shaping the behavior of humans with whom they interact. Here, we examine how the actions of a social robot can influence human-to-human communication, and not just robot–human communication, using groups of three humans and one robot playing 30 rounds of a collaborative game (n= 51 groups). We find that people in groups with a robot making vulnerable statements converse substantially more with each other, distribute their conversation somewhat more equally, and perceive their groups more positively compared to control groups with a robot that either makes neutral statements or no statements at the end of each round. Shifts in robot speech have the power not only to affect how people interact with robots, but also how people interact with each other, offering the prospect for modifying social interactions via the introduction of artificial agents into hybrid systems of humans and machines.

Intelligent machines as social catalysts

“…There is much to be done in the wake of the research of Traeger et al (1). Indeed, our interpretation of their findings is entirely speculative as are most of the perspectives we sketched in this comment.…”

“…Second, it intentionally sets a low bar for the sophistication of one's contribution to the conversation, which may encourage the most self-conscious, shy humans to engage in this conversation. This would help explain both the absolute and relative effects observed in the experiment of Traeger et al (1). If the humans who would have refrained from speaking are now encouraged to speak, human speaking time increases, and speaking time is more equally distributed among humans.…”

“…Given these requirements, it would seem that being a social catalyst is a quintessentially human role. The research of Traeger et al (1), however, opens perspectives about the possibility of having machines rather than people perform the role of social catalysts in human groups.…”

“…As we will discuss shortly, these two approaches come with their own sets of technical and ethical challenges. However, the research by Traeger et al (1) suggests that a third and unexpected approach is possible to using machines as social machines whose social actions are not as smooth as humans, but yet have more impact in changing human social behavior. In their research, Traeger et al (1) show that a robot uttering "vulnerable" statements can promote engagement within a human team both in absolute terms (total speaking time increases) and in relative terms (speaking time is more equally distributed).…”

Designing Virtuous Sex Robots

“…This behaviour led to the human participants who collaborated directly with a robot, to become more flexible in finding solutions that benefited group performance. Similarly, a related experiment [50] reported that humans who collaborated on a task with robots which made occasional mistakes and acknowledged their mistakes with an apology, became more social, laughing together more often, and more conversational.…”