skip to main content
10.1145/3171221.3171266acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageshriConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Mindless Robots get Bullied

Published: 26 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Humans recognise and respond to robots as social agents, to such extent that they occasionally attempt to bully a robot. The current paper investigates whether aggressive behaviour directed towards robots is influenced by the same social processes that guide human bullying behaviour. More specifically, it measured the effects of dehumanisation primes and anthropomorphic qualities of the robot on participants» verbal abuse of a virtual robotic agents. Contrary to previous findings in human-human interaction, priming participants with power did not result in less mind attribution. However, evidence for dehumanisation was still found, as the less mind participants attributed to the robot, the more aggressive responses they gave. In the main study this effect was moderated by the manipulations of power and robot anthropomorphism; the low anthropomorphic robot in the power prime condition endured significantly less abuse, and mind attribution remained a significant predictor for verbal aggression in all conditions save the low anthropomorphic robot with no prime. It is concluded that dehumanisation occurs in human-robot interaction and that like in human-human interaction, it is linked to aggressive behaviour. Moreover, it is argued that this dehumanisation is different from anthropomorphism as well as human-human dehumanisation, since anthropomorphism itself did not predict aggressive behaviour and dehumanisation of robots was not influenced by primes that have been established in human-human dehumanisation research.

References

[1]
SoftBank Group Aldebaran Robotics. 2014. Choregraphe for MacOS (2.1.4) {Computer software}. (2014).
[2]
Christoph Bartneck, Andreas Duenser, Elena Moltchanova, and Karolina Zawieska. 2015. Comparing the similarity of responses received from studies in Amazon's Mechanical Turk to studies conducted online and with direct recruitment. PloS one 10, 4 (2015), e0121595.
[3]
Christoph Bartneck, Juliane Reichenbach, and J. Carpenter. 2008. The Carrot and the Stick - The Role of Praise and Punishment in Human-Robot Interaction. Interaction Studies - Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems 9, 2 (2008), 179--203.
[4]
Christoph Bartneck, Michel Van Der Hoek, Omar Mubin, and Abdullah Al Mahmud. 2007. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do!: switching off a robot. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction. ACM/IEEE, Arlington, USA, 217--222.
[5]
Drazen Brscic, Hiroyuki Kidokoro, Yoshitaka Suehiro, and Takayuki Kanda. 2015. ´ Escaping from children's abuse of social robots. In Proceedings of the tenth annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction. ACM, ACM/IEEE, Portland, USA, 59--66.
[6]
Kenneth P Burnham and David R Anderson. 2003. Model selection and multimodel inference: a practical information-theoretic approach. Springer Science & Business Media, New York.
[7]
Emanuele Castano and Miroslaw Kofta. 2009. Dehumanization: Humanity and its denial. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 12, 6 (2009), 695--697.
[8]
Emanuele Castano, Miroslaw Kofta, Sabina Cehajić, Rupert Brown, and Roberto ´ Gonzalez. 2009. What do I care? Perceived ingroup responsibility and dehuman- ´ ization as predictors of empathy felt for the victim group. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 12, 6 (2009), 715--729.
[9]
Kate Darling. 2012. Extending legal rights to social robots. In We Robot Conference, University of Miami. University of Miami, Miami, USA, 1--24.
[10]
Antonella De Angeli and Sheryl Brahnam. 2008. I hate you! Disinhibition with virtual partners. Interacting with computers 20, 3 (2008), 302--310.
[11]
Antonella De Angeli, Sheryl Brahnam, Peter Wallis, and Alan Dix. 2006. Misuse and abuse of interactive technologies. In CHI'06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, Montreal, Canada, 1647--1650.
[12]
Nicholas Epley, Scott Akalis, Adam Waytz, and John T Cacioppo. 2008. Creating social connection through inferential reproduction: Loneliness and perceived agency in gadgets, gods, and greyhounds. Psychological Science 19, 2 (2008), 114--120.
[13]
Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, and John T Cacioppo. 2007. On seeing human: a three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological review 114, 4 (2007), 864--886.
[14]
Friederike Eyssel, Dieta Kuchenbrandt, Simon Bobinger, Laura de Ruiter, and Frank Hegel. 2012. 'If you sound like me, you must be more human': on the interplay of robot and user features on human-robot acceptance and anthropomorphism. In Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM/IEEE, Boston, USA, 125--126.
[15]
Friederike A Eyssel and Michaela Pfundmair. 2015. Predictors of psychological anthropomorphization, mind perception, and the fulfillment of social needs: A case study with a zoomorphic robot. In Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2015 24th IEEE International Symposium on. IEEE, Kobe, Japan, 827--832.
[16]
Adam D Galinsky, Deborah H Gruenfeld, and Joe C Magee. 2003. From power to action. Journal of personality and social psychology 85, 3 (2003), 453--466.
[17]
Adam D Galinsky, Joe C Magee, M Ena Inesi, and Deborah H Gruenfeld. 2006. Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological science 17, 12 (2006), 1068--1074.
[18]
Valeria Gazzola, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Bruno Wicker, and Christian Keysers. 2007. The anthropomorphic brain: the mirror neuron system responds to human and robotic actions. Neuroimage 35, 4 (2007), 1674--1684.
[19]
Heather M Gray, Kurt Gray, and Daniel M Wegner. 2007. Dimensions of mind perception. Science 315, 5812 (2007), 619.
[20]
Jason D Gwinn, Charles M Judd, and Bernadette Park. 2013. Less power= less human? Effects of power differentials on dehumanization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49, 3 (2013), 464--470.
[21]
Nick Haslam. 2006. Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and social psychology review 10, 3 (2006), 252--264.
[22]
Nick Haslam and Steve Loughnan. 2014. Dehumanization and infrahumanization. Annual review of psychology 65 (2014), 399--423.
[23]
Nick Haslam, Stephen Loughnan, Yoshihisa Kashima, and Paul Bain. 2008. Attributing and denying humanness to others. European review of social psychology 19, 1 (2008), 55--85.
[24]
Chin-Chang Ho and Karl F MacDorman. 2010. Revisiting the uncanny valley theory: Developing and validating an alternative to the Godspeed indices. Computers in Human Behavior 26, 6 (2010), 1508--1518.
[25]
Apple Inc. 1995--2016. TextEdit (Version 1.12 (329)) {Computer software}, voice "Princess". (1995--2016).
[26]
Takayuki Kanda, Rumi Sato, Naoki Saiwaki, and Hiroshi Ishiguro. 2007. A twomonth field trial in an elementary school for long-term human--robot interaction. IEEE Transactions on robotics 23, 5 (2007), 962--971.
[27]
Jari Katsyri, Klaus F ¨ orger, Meeri M ¨ ak¨ ar¨ ainen, and Tapio Takala. 2015. A review ¨ of empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: Support for perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley of eeriness. Frontiers in psychology 6, Article 360 (2015), 14 pages.
[28]
Sara Kim and Ann L McGill. 2011. Gaming with Mr. Slot or gaming the slot machine? Power, anthropomorphism, and risk perception. Journal of Consumer Research 38, 1 (2011), 94--107.
[29]
Megan N Kozak, Abigail A Marsh, and Daniel M Wegner. 2006. What do I think you're doing? Action identification and mind attribution. Journal of personality and social psychology 90, 4 (2006), 543--555.
[30]
Soren Krach, Frank Hegel, Britta Wrede, Gerhard Sagerer, Ferdinand Binkofski, ¨ and Tilo Kircher. 2008. Can machines think? Interaction and perspective taking with robots investigated via fMRI. PloS One 3, 7 (2008), e2597.
[31]
Noam Lapidot-Lefler and Azy Barak. 2012. Effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eye-contact on toxic online disinhibition. Computers in human behavior 28, 2 (2012), 434--443.
[32]
Kwan Min Lee. 2004. Presence, explicated. Communication theory 14, 1 (2004), 27--50.
[33]
Bernhard Leidner, Emanuele Castano, and Jeremy Ginges. 2013. Dehumanization, retributive and restorative justice, and aggressive versus diplomatic intergroup conflict resolution strategies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 39, 2 (2013), 181--192.
[34]
James H Lesher et al. 2001. Xenophanes of Colophon: fragments: a text and translation with a commentary. Vol. 4. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
[35]
Jamy Li. 2015. The benefit of being physically present: A survey of experimental works comparing copresent robots, telepresent robots and virtual agents. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 77 (2015), 23--37.
[36]
Meng Yao Li, Bernhard Leidner, and Emanuelle Castano. 2014. Toward a comprehensive taxonomy of dehumanization: integrating two senses of humanness, mind perception theory, and stereotype content model. TPM: Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology 21, 3 (2014), 285--300.
[37]
Stephen Loughnan and Nick Haslam. 2007. Animals and androids: Implicit associations between social categories and nonhumans. Psychological Science 18, 2 (2007), 116--121.
[38]
Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam, Tess Murnane, Jeroen Vaes, Catherine Reynolds, and Caterina Suitner. 2010. Objectification leads to depersonalization: The denial of mind and moral concern to objectified others. European Journal of Social Psychology 40, 5 (2010), 709--717.
[39]
Paul Benjamin Lowry, Jun Zhang, Chuang Wang, and Mikko Siponen. 2016. Why do adults engage in cyberbullying on social mediafi An integration of online disinhibition and deindividuation efiects with the social structure and social learning model. Information Systems Research 27, 4 (2016), 962--986.
[40]
Holger Luczak, Matthias Roetting, and Ludger Schmidt. 2003. Let's talk: anthropomorphization as means to cope with stress of interacting with technical devices. Ergonomics 46, 13--14 (2003), 1361--1374.
[41]
Karl F MacDorman and Debaleena Chattopadhyay. 2016. Reducing consistency in human realism increases the uncanny valley effect; increasing category uncertainty does not. Cognition 146 (2016), 190--205.
[42]
Kathryn L Modecki, Jeannie Minchin, Allen G Harbaugh, Nancy G Guerra, and Kevin C Runions. 2014. Bullying prevalence across contexts: A meta-analysis measuring cyber and traditional bullying. Journal of Adolescent Health 55, 5 (2014), 602--611.
[43]
Lilia Moshkina, Susan Trickett, and J Gregory Trafton. 2014. Social engagement in public places: a tale of one robot. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction. ACM/IEEE, Bielefeld, Germany, 382--389.
[44]
Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, and Ellen R Tauber. 1994. Computers are social actors. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, Boston, USA, 72--78.
[45]
Aaron Powers, Sara Kiesler, Susan Fussell, and Cristen Torrey. 2007. Comparing a computer agent with a humanoid robot. In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2007 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on. ACM/IEEE, Arlington, USA, 145--152.
[46]
Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. 1996. The Media Equation. CSLI Publications and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
[47]
Juliane Reichenbach, Christoph Bartneck, and Julie Carpenter. 2006. Well done, Robot! The importance of praise and presence in human-robot collaboration. In Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2006. ROMAN 2006. The 15th IEEE International Symposium on. IEEE, Hatfield, UK, 86--90.
[48]
Kathleen Richardson. 2016. The asymmetrical'relationship': parallels between prostitution and the development of sex robots. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 45, 3 (2016), 290--293.
[49]
Laurel D Riek, Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, Bhismadev Chakrabarti, and Peter Robinson. 2009. How anthropomorphism affects empathy toward robots. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction. ACM/IEEE, San Diego, USA, 245--246.
[50]
Astrid M Rosenthal-von der Putten, Nicole C Kr ¨ amer, Laura Hoffmann, Sabrina ¨ Sobieraj, and Sabrina C Eimler. 2013. An experimental study on emotional reactions towards a robot. International Journal of Social Robotics 5, 1 (2013), 17--34.
[51]
Peter AM Ruijten, Diane HL Bouten, Dana CJ Rouschop, Jaap Ham, and Cees JH Midden. 2014. Introducing a rasch-type anthropomorphism scale. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction. ACM/IEEE, Bielefeld, Germany, 280--281.
[52]
Maha Salem, Friederike Eyssel, Katharina Rohlfing, Stefan Kopp, and Frank Joublin. 2013. To err is human (-like): Effects of robot gesture on perceived anthropomorphism and likability. International Journal of Social Robotics 5, 3 (2013), 313--323.
[53]
Pericle Salvini, Gaetano Ciaravella, Wonpil Yu, Gabriele Ferri, Alessandro Manzi, Barbara Mazzolai, Cecilia Laschi, Sang-Rok Oh, and Paolo Dario. 2010. How safe are service robots in urban environments? Bullying a robot. In RO-MAN, 2010 IEEE. IEEE, Viareggio, Italy, 1--7.
[54]
Daniel J Simons and Christopher F Chabris. 2012. Common (mis)beliefs about memory: A replication and comparison of telephone and Mechanical Turk survey methods. PloS one 7, 12 (2012), e51876.
[55]
Mel Slater, Angus Antley, Adam Davison, David Swapp, Christoph Guger, Chris Barker, Nancy Pistrang, and Maria V Sanchez-Vives. 2006. A virtual reprise of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. PloS one 1, 1 (2006), e39.
[56]
Adobe Systems Software. 2017. Adobe After Effects CC for MacOS (14.2.1) {Computer software}. (2017).
[57]
Robert Sparrow. 2017. Robots, Rape, and Representation. International Journal of Social Robotics 9, 4 (2017), 465--477.
[58]
John Suler. 2004. The online disinhibition effect. Cyberpsychology & behavior 7, 3 (2004), 321--326.
[59]
Sam Thellman, Annika Silvervarg, Agneta Gulz, and Tom Ziemke. 2016. Physical vs. Virtual Agent Embodiment and Effects on Social Interaction. In Intelligent Virtual Agents: 16th International Conference, IVA 2016. Springer International Publishing, Los Angeles, USA, 412--415.
[60]
Anthony A Volk, Rene Veenstra, and Dorothy L Espelage. 2017. So you want to ´ study bullying? Recommendations to enhance the validity, transparency, and compatibility of bullying research. Aggression and violent behavior 36 (2017), 34--43.
[61]
Peter Wallis. 2005. Robust normative systems: What happens when a normative system fails. In Abuse: the darker side of human-computer interaction, Interact 2005. Rome, Italy, 68--72.
[62]
Adam Waytz and Nicholas Epley. 2012. Social connection enables dehumanization. Journal of experimental social psychology 48, 1 (2012), 70--76.
[63]
Adam Waytz, Nicholas Epley, and John T Cacioppo. 2010. Social cognition unbound: Insights into anthropomorphism and dehumanization. Current Directions in Psychological Science 19, 1 (2010), 58--62.
[64]
Adam Waytz, Carey K Morewedge, Nicholas Epley, George Monteleone, JiaHong Gao, and John T Cacioppo. 2010. Making sense by making sentient: effectance motivation increases anthropomorphism. Journal of personality and social psychology 99, 3 (2010), 410--465.
[65]
Blay Whitby. 2008. Sometimes it's hard to be a robot: A call for action on the ethics of abusing artificial agents. Interacting with Computers 20, 3 (2008), 326--333.
[66]
Ricarda Wullenkord, Marlena R Fraune, Friederike Eyssel, and Selma Sabanović 2016. Getting in Touch: How imagined, actual, and physical contact affect evaluations of robots. In Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on. IEEE, New York, USA, 980--985.
[67]
Jakub Zlotowski, E. Strasser, and C. Bartneck. 2014. Dimensions of anthropomorphism: from humanness to humanlikeness. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2014), G. Sagerer (Ed.). ACM/IEEE, New York, USA, 66--73.
[68]
Jakub Zlotowski, Hidenobu Sumioka, Christoph Bartneck, Shuichi Nishio, and Hiroshi Ishiguro. 2017. Understanding anthropomorphism: Anthropomorphism is not a reverse process of dehumanization. (2017), 6 pages.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)What is robot abuse? A sociotechnical definitionBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2025.2462268(1-19)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2025
  • (2025)Affect-Enhancing Speech Characteristics for Robotic CommunicationInternational Journal of Social Robotics10.1007/s12369-025-01221-w17:2(315-333)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Predicting humor effectiveness of robots for human line cuttingFrontiers in Robotics and AI10.3389/frobt.2024.140709511Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
February 2018
468 pages
ISBN:9781450349536
DOI:10.1145/3171221
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 February 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. anthropomorphism
  2. dehumanization
  3. mind attribution
  4. robot bullying
  5. verbal aggression

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

HRI '18
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

HRI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 49 of 206 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)121
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)20
Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)What is robot abuse? A sociotechnical definitionBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2025.2462268(1-19)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2025
  • (2025)Affect-Enhancing Speech Characteristics for Robotic CommunicationInternational Journal of Social Robotics10.1007/s12369-025-01221-w17:2(315-333)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Predicting humor effectiveness of robots for human line cuttingFrontiers in Robotics and AI10.3389/frobt.2024.140709511Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Expressing Anger with Robot for Tackling the Onset of Robot AbuseACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/369646714:1(1-23)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Investigation of Low-Moral Actions by Malicious Anonymous Operators of Avatar RobotsACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/369646614:1(1-34)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Investigating Robot AbuseProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3656650.3656759(1-3)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Qualitative Research of Robot-Helping Behaviors in a Field TrialACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/364000913:2(1-19)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
  • (2024)"Please Be Nice": Robot Responses to User Bullying - Measuring Performance Across Aggression LevelsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642290(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Can you let me go? Exploring Delivery Robots' Verbal Response to Physical Bullying and its Impact on Perceived Safety, Comfort, Acceptability, and Existence Acceptance by Co-Present IndividualsCompanion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610978.3640582(994-998)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Power in Human-Robot InteractionProceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610977.3634949(269-282)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media