From automata to animate beings: The scope and limits of attributing socialness to artificial agents

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms and consequences of attributing socialness to artificial agents has important implications for how we can use technology to lead more productive and fulfilling lives. Here, we integrate recent findings on the factors that shape behavioural and brain mechanisms that support social interactions between humans and artificial agents. We review how visual features of an agent, as well as knowledge factors within the human observer, shape attributions across dimensions of socialness. We explore how anthropomorphism and dehumanization further influence how we perceive and interact with artificial agents. Based on these findings, we argue that the cognitive reconstruction within the human observer is likely to be far more crucial in shaping our interactions with artificial agents than previously thought, while the artificial agent’s visual features are possibly of lesser importance. We integrate these findings to provide an integrative theoretical account based on the “like me” hypothesis, and discuss the key role played by the Theory-of-Mind network, especially the temporal parietal junction, in the shift from mechanistic to social attributions. We conclude by highlighting outstanding questions on the impact of long-term interactions with artificial agents on the behavioural and brain mechanisms of attributing socialness to these agents.

“Danger, Will Robinson!” The challenges of social robots for intergroup relations

“…Alternatively, as Gray and Wegner () have argued, it is not because androids physically resemble humans that causes the uneasiness, but the discomfort arises because such human‐looking robots are perceived as possessing human‐like qualities such as sentience and autonomy. For example, when Gray and Wegner told participants that a robot had some mind capacity (e.g., it could feel emotion), people felt more unnerved about the robot regardless of whether it had a human‐like or mechanical appearance (see also Hortensius & Cross, ). Similarly, Złotowski, Yogeeswaran, and Bartneck () found that when robots were depicted in a video as being autonomous they elicited more negative attitudes and perceptions of threat than robots that were non‐autonomous.…”

Distributed responsibility in human–machine interactions

“…If one assumes that there can be human-machine interactions that are not reducible to mere tool use and that such interactions can be meaningfully considered a new kind of social interaction, one must argue for expanding the notion of a social agent. 1 By this, one takes the position that certain artificial systems can qualify as social agents if they possess both a kind of agency (minimal agency) and a form of social competence (minimal socio-cognitive abilities) such that they can both contribute to an exchange of social information and have an influence on the outcome of a social interaction [20]. However, this claim that it is conceivable that certain artificial agents qualify as a new type of social agent does not yet imply that those agents automatically qualify as moral agents.…”

“…But outside of Western cultural ideas, for example, in Shintoism and Animism, objects are characterized as animate that are considered inanimate from a Western perspective. Furthermore, the claim that some human-machine interactions resemble social human-human interactions rather than reminding us of tool use is supported, for example, by the fact that the assumption that human-machine interactions are comparable to human-human interactions has already found its way into empirical research [1]. In several studies, experimental protocols with artificial agents are used to gain insights into human socio-cognitive mechanisms [2].…”

Meeting with social robots like the cat-cucumber meeting? An integrated model of human-robot first contact. Psychological perspective.

“…Robots in social perception are not only anthropomorphized, but people also attribute to them the socialness [58], recognizing them as social agents acting in relations with others, and being members of social groups. The sense of social presence when interacting with a social robot leads to higher enjoyment and his acceptance [59].…”