Gotta Hatch 'em All!

Abstract

In this paper, we present ongoing research combining two technologies to support children's cooperative interaction: interactive playgrounds and robots. We propose that interactive playgrounds are vehicles for playful cooperation when robots are integrated into the system as cooperative co-players. We developed the Hatch 'em all game, wherein children are encouraged to hatch eggs cooperatively with a robot, and tested the effect of the robot's cooperative behavior on the children. We found that when the robot played cooperatively, children cooperated and helped the robot more than when the robot played selfishly. Our findings suggest that the social affordances of the playground, together with the social interactions between the children and the robot, enabled instances of team cooperation and prosocial behavior. Our work contributes to the CSCW community by opening a novel avenue for supporting children's cooperation, which could serve as a future test-bed to investigate the role of robots in cooperative interaction.

The role of reciprocity in human-robot social influence

“…In other words, individuals who have been recently pleased by the robot may feel the urge of behaving nicely with it or, at least, abstaining from revealing a loss of confidence in the robot’s abilities, as commonly observed in human-human cooperative settings ( Bartlett and DeSteno, 2006 ; Berns et al., 2010 ). Our findings are consistent with recent evidence revealing the emergence of pro-social attitudes toward robots in adults ( Connolly et al., 2020 ; Kahn et al., 2015 ; Kühnlenz et al., 2018 ; Siegel et al., 2009 ) and children ( Beran et al., 2011 ; Chernyak and Gary, 2016 ; Martin et al., 2020 ; Zaga et al., 2017 ). Moreover, they can provide a pro-social interpretation of recent results revealing over-trust with the instructions of faulty or unreliable robots ( Aroyo et al., 2018 , 2021 ; Robinette et al., 2016 ; Salem et al., 2015 ).…”