Title
Robot Presence and Human Honesty: Experimental Evidence
Abstract
Robots are predicted to serve in environments in which human honesty is important, such as the workplace, schools, and public institutions. Can the presence of a robot facilitate honest behavior? In this paper, we describe an experimental study evaluating the effects of robot social presence on people's honesty. Participants completed a perceptual task, which is structured so as to allow them to earn more money by not complying with the experiment instructions. We compare three conditions between subjects: Completing the task alone in a room; completing it with a non-monitoring human present; and completing it with a non-monitoring robot present. The robot is a new expressive social head capable of 4-DoF head movement and screen-based eye animation, specifically designed and built for this research. It was designed to convey social presence, but not monitoring. We find that people cheat in all three conditions, but cheat equally less when there is a human or a robot in the room, compared to when they are alone. We did not find differences in the perceived authority of the human and the robot, but did find that people felt significantly less guilty after cheating in the presence of a robot as compared to a human. This has implications for the use of robots in monitoring and supervising tasks in environments in which honesty is key.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2696454.2696487
HRI
Keywords
Field
DocType
user/machine systems,monitoring,human-robot interaction,psychology,social presence,experimental study,honesty,human robot interaction
Simulation,Computer science,Honesty,Human–computer interaction,Animation,Computer Applications,Behavioural sciences,Cheating,Robot,Perception,Human–robot interaction
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2167-2121
978-1-4503-2882-1
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.61
13
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guy Hoffman170662.08
Jodi Forlizzi25042382.63
Shahar Ayal361.29
Aaron Steinfeld448646.01
John Antanitis5925.41
Guy Hochman661.29
Eric Hochendoner760.61
Justin Finkenaur880.98