Designing nudge agents that promote human altruism
This work addresses a gap in social robotics by testing nudging effects on human altruism, though it appears incremental as it applies known psychological mechanisms to a new context.
The study investigated whether subtle nudge mechanisms in social robot videos could promote human altruism, finding that participants who watched videos with the peak part at the end performed better in a Dictator game, indicating the peak-end effect successfully increased altruistic behavior.
Previous studies have found that nudging is key to promoting altruism in human-human interaction. However, in social robotics, there is still a lack of study on confirming the effect of nudging on altruism. In this paper, we apply two nudge mechanisms, peak-end and multiple viewpoints, to a video stimulus performed by social robots (virtual agents) to see whether a subtle change in the stimulus can promote human altruism. An experiment was conducted online through crowdsourcing with 136 participants. The result shows that the participants who watched the peak part set at the end of the video performed better at the Dictator game, which means that the nudge mechanism of the peak-end effect actually promoted human altruism.