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Toward a Hybrid Society

The Transformation of Robots, from Objects to Social Agents

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9979))

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Abstract

Social robots are machines developed to interact with humans. Unlike other technological devices, their presence in society requires accepting and treating them as social agents. This has important implications in terms of social changes for humans’ personal and social identity, and social interactions. We aim to explain the core features that characterize social robots by highlighting what makes them distinct from other types of innovative technology. Equally important, we illustrate how social psychology can provide a useful perspective to understand human-robot interactions. To do so, we focus on studies that have investigated the role of intergroup relations and social identity in the context of human-machine interactions to demonstrate that robots may comprise a new type of social outgroup in future society.

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Acknowledgment

This research has been conducted in the framework of the European Project CODEFROR (FP7 PIRSES-2013-612555) and it was supported by the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology ‘CITEC’ (EXC 277) at Bielefeld University, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We thank our colleagues Birte Schiffhauer, Julian Anslinger and Ricarda Wullenkord, who commented on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Francesco Ferrari & Friederike Eyssel

Authors
  1. Francesco Ferrari
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  2. Friederike Eyssel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesco Ferrari .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Indiana, USA

    Arvin Agah

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  3. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

    Ayanna M. Howard

  4. Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, University Carlos III de Madrid, madrid, Spain

    Miguel A. Salichs

  5. Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

    Hongsheng He

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Ferrari, F., Eyssel, F. (2016). Toward a Hybrid Society. In: Agah, A., Cabibihan, JJ., Howard, A., Salichs, M., He, H. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9979. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_89

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_89

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47436-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47437-3

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