Abstract
Recent studies showed that in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), humans perceive less agency over the negative outcomes of their actions, raising the Diffusion of responsibility (DOR) phenomenon. In the present study, we examined the effect of anthropomorphism on the reduction of agency when interacting with robots. To this end, young adults played a risk-taking task, in which they were asked to stop an inflating balloon before it reaches a pin and burst. However, every time they acted to stop the inflation of the balloon they were losing points from a starting score. Participants play the task alone, or together with a co-agent. Within-task, we manipulated the co-agent: a human, a robotic arm, and a humanoid robot. Results showed lower agency ratings reported when participants shared the task with the co-agent compared to when they performed the task alone. Interestingly, such a reduction was comparable across the three co-agents. This suggests that DOR in HRI occurs similarly to when interacting with a human being regardless of the level of anthropomorphism of the robotic partner.
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FC is supported by H2020–Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action agreement no. 893960. The content of this paper is the sole responsibility of the authors. The European Commission or its services cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
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Tuvo, E., Ricciardelli, P., Ciardo, F. (2022). The Effect of Anthropomorphism on Diffusion or Responsibility in HRI. In: Cavallo, F., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13818. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24670-8_43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24670-8_43
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