Cruelty towards robots

Abstract

We set out to test if the Media Equation could be applied to robots too, especially with negative behavior. This would mean that we, humans, are inclined to treat robots as same as we would another human-being. To do so we replicated an experiment done by Stanley Milgram in 1965. With this experiment Milgram tested how far people would go in torturing another person. We performed the experiment with a robot instead of a human-victim and compared the results of the two experiments. The differences between the results of the two experiments were very obvious. The subjects of our experiments went a lot further in torturing the robot. From this we conclude that the Media Equation only applies to human-robot interaction to a certain degree.