The trash talk in the study was decidedly mild, with utterances like, “I have to say you are a terrible player,” and “Over the course of the game your playing has become confused.” Even so, people who played a game with the robot—a commercially available humanoid robot known as Pepper—performed worse when the robot discouraged them and better when the robot encouraged them.
Lead author Aaron M. Roth says some of the 40 study participants were technically sophisticated and fully understood that a machine was the source of their discomfort.
“One participant said, ‘I don’t like what the robot is saying, but that’s the way it was programmed so I can’t blame it,'” says Roth, who conducted the study while he was a master’s student in the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute.
But the researchers found that, overall, human performance ebbed regardless of technical sophistication.
The study, presented last month at the IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) in New Delhi, India, is a departure from typical human-robot interaction studies, which tend to focus on how humans and robots can best work together.
“This is one of the first studies of human-robot interaction in an environment where they are not cooperating,” says coauthor Fei Fang, an assistant professor in the Institute for Software Research.
It has enormous implications for a world where the number of robots and internet of things (IoT) devices with artificial intelligence capabilities is expected to grow exponentially. “We can expect home assistants to be cooperative,” she says, “but in situations such as online shopping, they may not have the same goals as we do.”
The study was an outgrowth of a studen ..
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