Some are more equal than others: Ingroup robots gain some but not all benefits of team membership

Fraune, Marlena R.; Šabanović, Selma; Smith, Eliot R.

doi:10.1075/is.18043.fra

Article published In:

Interaction Studies
Vol. 21:3 (2020) ► pp.303–328

Some are more equal than others

Ingroup robots gain some but not all benefits of team membership

Marlena R. Fraune | New Mexico State University , USA

Selma Šabanović | Indiana University , USA

Eliot R. Smith | Indiana University , USA

How do people treat robot teammates compared to human opponents? Past research indicates that people favor, and behave more morally toward, ingroup than outgroup members. People also perceive that they have more moral responsibilities toward humans than nonhumans. This paper presents a 2×2×3 experimental study that placed participants (N = 102) into competing teams of humans and robots. We examined how people morally behave toward and perceive players depending on players’ Group Membership (ingroup, outgroup), Agent Type (human, robot), and participant group Team Composition (humans as minority, equal, or majority within the ingroup compared to robots). Results indicated that participants favored the ingroup over the outgroup and humans over robots – to the extent that they favored ingroup robots over outgroup humans. Interestingly, people differentiated more between ingroup than outgroup humans and robots. These effects generalized across Team Composition.

Keywords: human-robot interaction, group effects, multiple robots, morality

Article outline

I.Introduction
II.Background
- A.Group membership affects anthropomorphism and moral judgments
- B.Agent type affects anthropomorphism and moral judgments
- C.Team composition may affect group identification
  - Overview
III.Method
- A.Design
- B.Participants
- C.Procedure
- D.Robots
- E.Task
- F.Noise blast measure of moral behavior
- G.Measures
  - Noise blasts
  - Surveys
    - Manipulation check
    - Group cohesion
    - Anthropomorphism
    - Attitudes and emotions
    - Future behavior
      - Preference for who wins: Advantage points
      - Favoritism outside of the game: Money for enhancement
      - Desire to reduce pain: Free pass
      - Moral behavior: Future noise blast distribution
      - Demographics
IV.Results
- A.Manipulation check
  - Pain
  - Not like noise
- B.Group cohesion
  - Cooperation
  - Competition
  - Feeling in group
- C.Noise blasts volume
- D.Anthropomorphism
  - 1.Correlation between anthropomorphism measures
  - 2.Human nature and uniquely human traits
    - Positive human nature traits
    - Negative human nature traits
    - Positive uniquely human traits
    - Negative uniquely human traits
  - 3.Agency and experience
    - Agency
    - Positive experience
    - Negative experience
- E.Attitudes and emotions toward players
  - Attitude
  - Positive emotion
  - Negative emotion
- F.Future behavior
  - Preference for humans: Advantage Points
  - Favoritism outside the game: Money for enhancement
  - Desire to reduce pain: Free pass
  - Moral behavior: Future noise blast distribution
V.Discussion
VI.Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References

Published online: 9 February 2021

https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18043.fra

References

Ackerman, J. M., Shapiro, J. R., Neuberg, S. L., Kenrick, D. T., Becker, D. V., Griskevicius, V., … & Schaller, M.

(2006) They all look the same to me (unless they’re angry) from out-group homogeneity to out-group heterogeneity. Psychological Science, 17(10), 836–840.

Admoni, H., Hayes, B., Feil-Seifer, D., Ullman, D., & Scassellati, B.

(2013) Dancing With Myself: The effect of majority group size on perceptions of majority and minority robot group members. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 35, No. 35).

Bartneck, C., Van Der Hoek, M., Mubin, O., & Al Mahmud, A.

(2007, March). “Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do!” switching off a robot. In 2007 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 217–222). IEEE.

Biernat, M., & Manis, M.

(1994) Shifting standards and stereotype-based judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(1), 5.

Campbell, D. T.

(1958) Common fate, similarity, and other indices of the status of aggregates of persons as social entities. Behavioral Science, 3(1), 14–25.

Carpenter, J.

(2016) Culture and human-robot interaction in militarized spaces: A war story: Routledge.

Correia, F., Alves-Oliveira, P., Maia, N., Ribeiro, T., Petisca, S., Melo, F. S., & Paiva, A.

(2016, August). Just follow the suit! trust in human-robot interactions during card game playing. In 2016 25th IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 507–512). IEEE.

Correia, F., Mascarenhas, S., Prada, R., Melo, F. S., & Paiva, A.

(2018, February). Group-based emotions in teams of humans and robots. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 261–269). ACM.

Endsley, M. R.

(1988, May). Situation awareness global assessment technique (SAGAT). In Proceedings of the IEEE 1988 National Aerospace and Electronics Conference (pp. 789–795). IEEE.

(1995) Measurement of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 65–84.

Eyssel, F., De Ruiter, L., Kuchenbrandt, D., Bobinger, S., & Hegel, F.

(2012, March). ‘If you sound like me, you must be more human’: On the interplay of robot and user features on human-robot acceptance and anthropomorphism. In 2012 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 125–126). IEEE.

Fraune, M. R., Kawakami, S., Šabanović, S., De Silva, R., & Okada, M.

(2015) Three’s company, or a crowd?: The effects of robot number and behavior on HRI in Japan and the USA. Robotics: Science and Systems.

Fraune, M. R., Šabanović, S., Smith, E. R., Nishiwaki, Y., & Okada, M.

(2017, March). Threatening flocks and mindful snowflakes: How group entitativity affects perceptions of robots. In 2017 12th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI (pp. 205–213). IEEE.

Fraune, M. R., & Šabanović, S.

(2014, August). Negative attitudes toward minimalistic robots with intragroup communication styles. In The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp. 1116–1121). IEEE.

Fraune, M. R., Šabanović, S., & Smith, E. R.

(2017) Teammates first: Favoring ingroup robots over outgroup humans. In 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 1432–1437). IEEE.

Fraune, M. R., Sherrin, S., Šabanović, S., & Smith, E. R.

(2015, March). Rabble of robots effects: Number and type of robots modulates attitudes, emotions, and stereotypes. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 109–116). ACM.

Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M.

(2007) Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315(5812), 619–619.

Greenwald, A. G., & Pettigrew, T. F.

(2014) With malice toward none and charity for some: Ingroup favoritism enables discrimination. American Psychologist, 69(7), 669.

Haslam, N., & Loughnan, S.

(2014) Dehumanization and infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology, 651, 399–423.

Haslam, N., Loughnan, S., Kashima, Y., & Bain, P.

(2008) Attributing and denying humanness to others. European Review of Social Psychology, 19(1), 55–85.

Hogg, M. A.

(2010) Influence and leadership. Handbook of Social Psychology.

Insko, C. A., Hoyle, R. H., Pinkley, R. L., Hong, G.-Y., Slim, R. M., Dalton, B., … Bernthal, P. R.

(1988) Individual-group discontinuity: The role of a consensus rule. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 24(6), 505–519.

Insko, C. A., Wildschut, T., & Cohen, T. R.

(2013) Interindividual–intergroup discontinuity in the prisoner’s dilemma game: How common fate, proximity, and similarity affect intergroup competition. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 120(2), 168–180.

Judd, C. M., & Park, B.

(1988) Out-group homogeneity: Judgments of variability at the individual and group levels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 778.

Kahn Jr, P. H., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Freier, N. G., Severson, R. L., Gill, B. T., … Shen, S.

(2012) “Robovie, you’ll have to go into the closet now”: Children’s social and moral relationships with a humanoid robot. Developmental Psychology, 48(2), 303.

Kahn, P. H., Reichert, A. L., Gary, H. E., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Shen, S., … & Gill, B.

(2011, March). The new ontological category hypothesis in human-robot interaction. In 2011 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 159–160). IEEE.

Kim, Y., & Sundar, S. S.

(2012) Anthropomorphism of computers: Is it mindful or mindless? Computers in Human Behavior, 28(1), 241–250.

Kuchenbrandt, D., Eyssel, F., Bobinger, S., & Neufeld, M.

(2013) When a Robot’s Group Membership Matters. International Journal of Social Robotics, 5(3), 409–417.

Lee, S. L., & Lau, I. Y. M.

(2011, March). Hitting a robot vs. hitting a human: is it the same?. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction (pp. 187–188). ACM.

Leidner, B., & Castano, E.

(2012) Morality shifting in the context of intergroup violence. European Journal of Social Psychology, 42(1), 82–91.

Leite, I., McCoy, M., Lohani, M., Ullman, D., Salomons, N., Stokes, C., … & Scassellati, B.

(2015, March). Emotional storytelling in the classroom: Individual versus group interaction between children and robots. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 75–82). ACM.

Levine, J. M., & Moreland, R. L.

(1994) Group socialization: Theory and research. European Review of Social Psychology, 5(1), 305–336.

Loughnan, S., & Haslam, N.

(2007) Animals and androids implicit associations between social categories and nonhumans. Psychological Science, 18(2), 116–121.

Nass, C., Fogg, B., & Moon, Y.

(1996) Can computers be teammates? International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 45(6), 669–678.

Robertson, J.

(2017) Robot Reincarnation. Life in Post-Bubble Japan, 1531.

Sachdev, I., & Bourhis, R. Y.

(1991) Power and status differentials in minority and majority group relations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 21(1), 1–24.

Suzuki, M.

(2015) A Funeral for ‘Aibo’Robot Dogs at a Temple Near Tokyo.

Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C.

(1971) Social categorization and intergroup behaviour. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1(2), 149–178.

Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S.

(1987) Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory: Basil Blackwell.

Twenge, J. M., Baumeister, R. F., Tice, D. M., & Stucke, T. S.

(2001) If you can’t join them, beat them: effects of social exclusion on aggressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 1058.

Waytz, A., Gray, K., Epley, N., & Wegner, D. M.

(2010) Causes and consequences of mind perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(8), 383–388.

Wullenkord, R., Fraune, M. R., Eyssel, F., & Šabanović, S.

(2016) Getting in touch: How imagined, actual, and physical contact affect evaluations of robots. In 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 980–985). IEEE.

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Fraune, Marlena R.

2020. Our Robots, Our Team: Robot Anthropomorphism Moderates Group Effects in Human–Robot Teams. Frontiers in Psychology 11

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.