Use a robot to serve experimental psychology: Some examples of methods with children and adults

Abstract

Robots are increasingly used in scientific research. Given the multitude of existing robots, how to choose the most adapted robot to a research and above all, how to use it to study biases in reasoning or in decision making? We suggested studying well-known biases from a new point of view: social norms, including social behaviors, social context and pragmatics of language. How to measure the impact of implicit social factors on the term of an experimental interaction when the experimenter cannot control non-verbal social cues he emits? A robot, whose behavior can entirely be programmed, constitutes a useful tool for this level. Authors' purpose is to expose a new method, accessible to all and neophytes in computers, which can be applied to a humanoid reactive robot for scientific research. Harel's “statechart” bring a formalism allowing deriving from it a program in which the states of the artificial system can be modeled in terms of states-actions. The technics and advantages brought by this proposed method will be reviewed through the illustration of two studies: the first one focusing on inclusion processes in younger children, the second one on the endowment effect within a sample of adults.