The Impact of Intergroup Bias on Trust and Approach Behaviour Towards a Humanoid Robot

摘要

As robots become commonplace, and for successful human-robot interaction to occur, people will need to trust them. Two experiments were conducted using the minimal paradigm to explore whether social identity theory influences trust formation and impressions of a robot. In Experiment 1, participants were allocated to either a or group, and then they played a cooperative visual tracking game with an Aldebaran Nao humanoid as a partner. We hypothesised participants in the robot group would demonstrate intergroup bias by sitting closer to the (proxemics) and trusting the robot's suggested answers more frequently than their computer group counterparts. Experiment 2 used an almost identical procedure with a different set of participants; however, all participants were assigned to the robot group and thee different levels of anthropomorphic movement were manipulated. Our results suggest that intergroup bias and humanlike movement can significantly affect human-robot approach behaviour. Significant effects were found for trusting the robot's suggested answers with respect to task difficulty, but not for membership or movement.