Colin Holbrook
Papers
3
Total Citations
19
H-Index
2
About
Colin Holbrook is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of social cognition, evolutionary psychology, and human-robot interaction. His scholarship investigates how fundamental psychological mechanisms — particularly those governing threat perception, coalitional reasoning, and social trust — shape human responses to artificial agents and robotic systems. Holbrook's most influential recent contribution, "Overtrust in AI Recommendations About Whether or Not to Kill" (2024, 14 citations), breaks significant ground by examining how people navigate life-or-death decisions when guided by artificial agents. Using a novel threat-identification paradigm distinguishing enemy combatants from civilians, this work reveals troubling patterns of deference to AI judgment in high-stakes contexts. Complementing this, his 2018 study on violent intergroup conflict and robotic personhood demonstrates that threat environments activate coalitional biases that diminish anthropomorphic perception of robots — a finding with meaningful implications for deploying robotics in conflict zones. His 2024 work on physical anthropomorphism further reveals that a robot's human-like appearance, rather than gender presentation, drives trust across sensitive household domains. Collectively, Holbrook's research challenges assumptions about human-AI collaboration, urging greater scrutiny of the social-psychological forces that make people vulnerable to overtrusting — or dismissing — artificial agents in consequential situations.
Research Focus
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Top Papers
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