Verbal Disinhibition towards Robots is Associated with General\n Antisociality

Abstract

The emergence of agentic technologies (e.g., robots) in increasingly public\nrealms (e.g., social media) has revealed surprising antisocial tendencies in\nhuman-agent interactions. In particular, there is growing indication of\npeople's propensity to act aggressively towards such systems - without\nprovocation and unabashedly so.\n Towards understanding whether this aggressive behavior is anomalous or\nwhether it is associated with general antisocial tendencies in people's broader\ninteractions, we examined people's verbal disinhibition towards two artificial\nagents. Using Twitter as a corpus of free-form, unsupervised interactions, we\nidentified 40 independent Twitter users who tweeted abusively or non-abusively\nat one of two high-profile robots with Twitter accounts (TMI's Bina48 and\nHanson Robotics' Sophia). Analysis of 50 of each user's tweets most proximate\nto their tweet at the respective robot (N=2,000) shows people's aggression\ntowards the robots to be associated with more frequent abuse in their general\ntweeting. The findings thus suggest that disinhibition towards robots is not\nnecessarily a pervasive tendency, but rather one driven by individual\ndifferences in antisociality. Nevertheless, such unprovoked abuse highlights a\nneed for attention to the reception of agentic technologies in society, as well\nas the necessity of corresponding capacities to recognize and respond to\nantisocial dynamics.\n