Understanding the Link Between Robots Perspective Taking, and Humans Formulating a Mental Model and Exhibiting Prosocial Behaviour

Sammanfattning: For effective Human-Robot Interactions, robots have to achieve the same level of understanding as humans in every aspect. Humans are highly versatile, able to switch between frames of reference and consider multiple perspectives efficiently. Additionally, humans help and care for each other in the hope of contributing to a better society. When we talk about interacting with robots, the uncertainty around how to collaborate with them has become an emerging topic in the past few years. To bring social robots into humans’ lives, researchers need to understand the conditions and implications of robots’ actions on human responses and perceptions of robots. This project aims at understanding the link between a robot taking a human’s perspective and the human’s exhibition of prosocial behaviour toward the robot. To test our hypotheses, we have designed an activity where the participant picks an object from an array of objects in front of them, after listening to the robot’s descriptions of that object. Divided into three between-subject conditions, the robot took different perspectives to address the objects in each condition. After completing the tasks, participants could either help the robot collect speech data or move on with filling the final questionnaire and finishing the experiment. Our findings show that the participants were significantly more likely to help the robot when the robot took their perspective (human-centred) compared to both the control condition (object-centred) and when the robot did not take their perspective (robot-centred). Additionally, the results show that when the robot’s descriptions of an object were ambiguous, in the first instruction, 96% of the participants perceived the robot’s first instruction using an egocentric perspective. However, when the robot made such ambiguous instructions again later, participants perceived the instructions based on the mental model developed about the robot for that condition.