Effects of Human-Likeness on Robot Use in High-Risk Environments

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the design of robots can impact the level of trust, liking, and empathy that a user feels towards a robot. Additionally, this empathy can have direct impacts on users’ interactions with the system. Existing research has looked at how empathy can influence user willingness to, for example, put the robot in harm’s way or to destroy the robot. However, these studies have been inherently reliant upon narrative driven manipulations, which may result in experimental demands which could have influenced the results. As such, we provide a human-likeness manipulation in order to evaluate the impacts of design which may evoke empathy, on use of robots in high-risk environments. Results indicate no significant difference in robot use between conditions. These results are in conflict with previous research. More research is needed to understand when users are/are not willing to use a robot in a high-risk environment.

Does My Driver Share My Moral View? Effects of Humanlikeness and Morality in an Adapted Trolley Problem

“…Humanlike characteristics can even influence trust in clearly non-humanoid systems, such as autonomous vehicles (Niu, Terken, & Eggen, 2018;Ruijten, Terken, & Chandramouli, 2018). However, findings are inconclusive on whether users may disuse humanlike systems in environments where harm to the system may be more likely (Tenhundfeld et al, 2021). Better understanding how humanlikeness impacts trust may allow designers to develop systems with a suitable degree of humanlikeness for their intended task and domain.…”