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Should I Blame the Human or the Robot? Attribution Within a Human–Robot Group

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Abstract

The present research studies the attribution of credit for success and attribution of blame for failure in a human–robot group. In the experiment, two participants of the same gender and a robot composed of a group that cooperated to solve the desert survival problem. Each group completed two tasks whose outcomes were manipulated: one task succeeded, and the other task failed. The participants were asked to attribute the credit of success and blame of failure to the group members, including the robot member, the human member, and the participants themselves. The results are as follows. First, participants attributed more credit and less blame to the robot member than to themselves. Second, participants attributed less blame to the human member than to themselves, and no significant difference was observed in the attribution of credit between them. Third, the robot member was more blamed than the human member, whereas they received similar levels of credit. Finally, compared with male participants, female participants assigned more credit and less blame to the robot member. The findings in this paper shed some light on the allocation of responsibility based on outcomes in human–robot groups.

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  1. Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Xin Lei & Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

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  1. Xin Lei
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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 8 and 9.

Table 8 Speaking order of group members during discussion
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Table 9 The robot’s rankings and reasons for Task IM and Task UM
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Lei, X., Rau, PL.P. Should I Blame the Human or the Robot? Attribution Within a Human–Robot Group. Int J of Soc Robotics 13, 363–377 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00645-w

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