The role of reciprocity in human-robot social influence
This addresses the problem of enhancing human-robot collaboration through social influence mechanisms, but it is incremental as it builds on known human social dynamics.
The study investigated whether reciprocal social influence can emerge in human-robot interactions during a joint perceptual task, finding that while participants lost confidence in the robot when it followed their advice, they were unwilling to disclose this lack of confidence, suggesting reciprocal mechanisms support collaboration.
Humans are constantly influenced by others' behavior and opinions. Of importance, social influence among humans is shaped by reciprocity: we follow more the advice of someone who has been taking into consideration our opinions. In the current work, we investigate whether reciprocal social influence can emerge while interacting with a social humanoid robot. In a joint task, a human participant and a humanoid robot made perceptual estimates and then could overtly modify them after observing the partner's judgment. Results show that endowing the robot with the ability to express and modulate its own level of susceptibility to the human's judgments represented a double-edged sword. On the one hand, participants lost confidence in the robot's competence when the robot was following their advice; on the other hand, participants were unwilling to disclose their lack of confidence to the susceptible robot, suggesting the emergence of reciprocal mechanisms of social influence supporting human-robot collaboration.