Folk-Psychological Interpretation of Human vs. Humanoid Robot Behavior: Exploring the Intentional Stance toward Robots

Abstract

People rely on shared folk-psychological theories when judging behavior. These theories guide people’s social interactions and therefore need to be taken into consideration in the design of robots and other autonomous systems expected to interact socially with people. It is, however, not yet clear to what degree the mechanisms that underlie people’s judgments of robot behavior overlap or differ from the case of human or animal behavior. To explore this issue, participants (N = 90) were exposed to images and verbal descriptions of eight different behaviors exhibited either by a person or a humanoid robot. Participants were asked to rate the intentionality, controllability and desirability of the behaviors, and to judge the plausibility of seven different types of explanations derived from a recently proposed psychological model of lay causal explanation of human behavior. Results indicate: substantially similar judgments of human and robot behavior, both in terms of (1a) ascriptions of intentionality/controllability/desirability and in terms of (1b) plausibility judgments of behavior explanations; (2a) high level of agreement in judgments of robot behavior – (2b) slightly lower but still largely similar to agreement over human behaviors; (3) systematic differences in judgments concerning the plausibility of goals and dispositions as explanations of human vs. humanoid behavior. Taken together, these results suggest that people’s intentional stance toward the robot was in this case very similar to their stance toward the human.

More Than You Expect: Priors Influence on the Adoption of Intentional Stance Toward Humanoid Robots

“…Research with this type of robots is crucial as those share the most physical features and behavior with human agents and also because these robots would be the first ones that will interact with people in social contexts. In particular, [15] evaluated whether people would rate the behavior of the robot in terms of lay causal explanation of human behaviour. They found that people tended to adopt the intentional stance toward the robot to a similar degree as in the case of observing other humans.…”

Intentional Mindset Toward Robots—Open Questions and Methodological Challenges

“…In their paradigms, participants rated behaviors performed by either humans or robots in terms of, among other aspects, intentionality. The authors found that perceived intentionality of behaviors performed by robots, largely, closely matched that of identical behaviors performed by humans (Thellman et al, 2017;de Graaf and Malle, 2018). Note, however, that these findings come from surveys in which participants consider behaviors based on either written scenarios or pictures, and therefore reflect a conceptual consideration of the behavior, and not a direct reaction to it (Fussell et al, 2008).…”

Adopting the intentional stance toward natural and artificial agents

“…Importantly, adopting the intentional stance towards an artificial agent does not imply that the agent has true intentionality. However, humans might treat agents as if they had mental states (Thellman et al 2017). Therefore, adopting intentional stance does not require that artificial agents are endowed with mental states in the human sense, but rather that the user might be able to intuitively and reliably explain and predict their behaviour in these terms.…”