Title
Is Human-Robot Interaction More Competitive Between Groups Than Between Individuals?
Abstract
As robots, both individually and in groups, become more prevalent in everyday contexts (e.g., schools, workplaces, educational and caregiving institutions), it is possible that they will be perceived as outgroups, or come into competition for resources with humans. Research indicates that some of the psychological effects of intergroup interaction common in humans translate to human-robot interaction (HRI). In this paper, we examine how intergroup competition, like that among humans, translates to HRI. Specifically, we examined how Number of Humans (1, 3) and Number of Robots (1, 3) affect behavioral competition on dilemma tasks and survey ratings of perceived threat, emotion, and motivation (fear, greed, and outperformance). We also examined the effect of perceived group entitativity (i.e., cohesiveness) on competition motivation. Like in social psychological literature, these results indicate that groups of humans (especially entitative groups) showed more greed-based motivation and competition toward robots than individual humans did. However, we did not find evidence that number of robots had an effect on fear-based motivation or competition against them unless the robot groups were perceived as highly entitative. Our data also show the intriguing finding that participants displayed more fear of and competed slightly more against robots that matched their number. Future research should more deeply examine this novel pattern of results compared to one-on-one HRI and typical group dynamics in social psychology.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/HRI.2019.8673241
2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Robots in society,social robotics,groups of robots,group effects,discontinuity effect,competition,greed,fear,outperformance
Social psychology,Social robot,Computer science,Group cohesiveness,Human–computer interaction,Dilemma,Robot,Entitativity,Human–robot interaction,Ingroups and outgroups
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2167-2121
978-1-5386-8555-6
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marlena R. Fraune1376.66
Steven Sherrin2151.83
Selma Šabanović3353.22
Eliot R. Smith4325.27