Do we adopt the Intentional Stance towards humanoid robots?

Abstract

In daily social interactions, we need to be able to navigate efficiently through our social environment. According to Dennett (1971), explaining and predicting others’ behaviour with reference to mental states (adopting the intentional stance) allows efficient social interaction. Today we also routinely interact with artificial agents: from Apple’s Siri to GPS navigation systems. In the near future, we might start casually interacting with robots. This paper addresses the question of whether adopting the intentional stance can also occur with respect to artificial agents. We propose a new tool to explore if people adopt the intentional stance towards an artificial agent (humanoid robot). The tool consists in a questionnaire that probes participants’ stance by requiring them to choose the likelihood of an explanation (mentalistic vs. mechanistic) of a behaviour of a robot iCub depicted in a naturalistic scenario (a sequence of photographs). The results of the first study conducted with this questionnaire showed that although the explanations were somewhat biased towards the mechanistic stance, a substantial number of mentalistic explanations were also given. This suggests that it is possible to induce adoption of the intentional stance towards artificial agents, at least in some contexts.

Intentional Mindset Toward Robots—Open Questions and Methodological Challenges

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In natural interaction with embodied robots, we prefer it when they follow our gaze: a gaze-contingent mobile eyetracking study

“…It might therefore be that humans also adopt the intentional stance towards humanoid robots, and that a certain type of social interaction with them might influence the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance. To examine this, we presented a theory of mind test and a recently developed intentional stance recently developed questionnaire [18] directly after the participants completed the experimental session with each robot identity.…”

At first sight: robots’ subtle eye movement parameters affect human attentional engagement, spontaneous attunement and perceived human-likeness

“…Some of them reported that this specific behavior seemed to be fluid, while the "faster" behavior seemed "glitchy". We speculate that when humans approach a robot, they automatically adopt most available strategies to interpret and predict robot behavior (see [22] for a more elaborate argumentation along these lines). These strategies might be influenced by prior assumptions, knowledge1, expectations (all not necessarily realistic) that partici-1 Our participants' education, for example, negatively correlated with the ratings, suggesting that the more a person might be informed about technology, science or research, the more s/he avoids attributing high human-likeness toward an artificial agent (r=-0.35, p=0.04).…”