A Robot by Any Other Frame: Framing and Behaviour Influence Mind Perception in Virtual but not Real-World Environments
This research addresses the problem of understanding mind perception in human-robot interaction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing concepts like anthropomorphism and identifies limitations in experimental methods.
The study investigated how framing and social behavior influence mind perception in robots, finding that these factors had effects in virtual experiments but failed to replicate in a real-world setting, suggesting that real-world interactions are harder to manipulate.
Mind perception in robots has been an understudied construct in human-robot interaction (HRI) compared to similar concepts such as anthropomorphism and the intentional stance. In a series of three experiments, we identify two factors that could potentially influence mind perception and moral concern in robots: how the robot is introduced (framing), and how the robot acts (social behaviour). In the first two online experiments, we show that both framing and behaviour independently influence participants' mind perception. However, when we combined both variables in the following real-world experiment, these effects failed to replicate. We hence identify a third factor post-hoc: the online versus real-world nature of the interactions. After analysing potential confounds, we tentatively suggest that mind perception is harder to influence in real-world experiments, as manipulations are harder to isolate compared to virtual experiments, which only provide a slice of the interaction.