Can't Do or Won't Do?: Social Attributions in Human-Agent Cooperation (Extended Abstract)

We highlight how human–agent cooperation is linked to the attribution of critical qualities like trustworthiness and competence to the cooperation partner. To investigate these aspects in a systematic fashion, we devise a novel paradigm of an interactive cooperation game that goes beyond commonly adopted economic scenarios. Our results indicate how a less skillful agent that shows little appreciation for its human partner’s suggestions regarding the next action is ascribed negative trustworthiness, but also positive competence. This suggests that perceived competence and cooperativeness interact with each other in important ways that can be studied jointly in an interactive cooperation game scenario.