It’s a Match: Task Assignment in Human–Robot Collaboration Depends on Mind Perception

Abstract

Robots are becoming more available for workplace collaboration, but many questions remain. Are people actually willing to assign collaborative tasks to robots? And if so, exactly which tasks will they assign to what kinds of robots? Here we leverage psychological theories on person-job fit and mind perception to investigate task assignment in human–robot collaborative work. We propose that people will assign robots to jobs based on their “perceived mind,” and also that people will show predictable social biases in their collaboration decisions. In this study, participants performed an arithmetic (i.e., calculating differences) and a social (i.e., judging emotional states) task, either alone or by collaborating with one of two robots: an emotionally capable robot or an emotionally incapable robot. Decisions to collaborate (i.e., to assign the robots to generate the answer) rates were high across all trials, especially for tasks that participants found challenging (i.e., the arithmetic task). Collaboration was predicted by perceived robot-task fit, such that the emotional robot was assigned the social task. Interestingly, the arithmetic task was assigned more to the emotionally incapable robot, despite the emotionally capable robot being equally capable of computation. This is consistent with social biases (e.g., gender bias) in mind perception and person-job fit. The theoretical and practical implications of this work for HRI are being discussed.

Antecedents of human-robot collaboration: theoretical extension of the technology acceptance model

“…Grosz and Kraus (1999) believed that the best teamwork could be achieved when team members understand each other well. In this context, Wiese et al (2021) and Del Giudice et al (2021aGiudice et al ( , 2021b) noted that we need to disclose how workers rely on machine agents in collective events, while robots have become more prevalent as work partners. Therefore, ensuring HRC and convincing employees to work with robots is a unique challenge for organizations (Bröhl et al, 2019).…”

“…The goal of Industry 5.0 is to “combine human creativity and craftsmanship with the speed, productivity and consistency of robots” (European Economic and Social Committee, 2018). Therefore, the use of robots in daily life is becoming more prevalent and creating new research areas (Tung and Law, 2017; Henschel et al , 2020; Wiese et al , 2021). Nowadays, space, industrial, social, medical and service robots assist humans in complex and repetitive tasks.…”

Collaboratively framed interactions increase the adoption of intentional stance towards robots

“…Since collaborative framing could highlight that iCub and the participant would experience the outcomes together, we hypothesized that participants would be more likely to adopt the intentional stance towards the robot, relative to the condition when the interaction is framed as individualistic. This hypothesis is driven by the fact that perception of robots can influence how people choose to collaborate with them [29].…”

[PREPRINT] Mind the Machines: Applying Implicit Measures of Mind Perception to Social Robotics

“…Mind perception has been shown to influence important aspects of social cognition relevant for HRI, such as task allocation [56], the desire to use a robot [57], or the acceptance of physical abuse and violence towards robots [58].…”