The carrot and the stick The role of praise and punishment in human-robot interaction

This paper presents two studies that investigate how people praise and plUlish robots in a collaborative game s<:enario. In a firsl study. subjects played a game together with humans, computers, and anthropomorphic and womorphic robots. The different partners and the game ilselfwere presented on a computt'T screen. Results showed that praise and punishment were used the same way for compuler and human partners. Yet robots., which are essentially computers with a differl'nt embodiment, were treated differt'ntly. Very machine-like robots were treated just like the compuler and the human; robots very high on anthropomorphism I womorphism were praised more and punished less. However, barely any of the participants believed that they actually played together with a robot After this first study, we refined the method and also tested if the presence ofa real robot, in comparison to a screen representation, would influence the measurements. The robot, in the form of an AIBO, would either be present in the room or only be represented on the participants' computer screen (presence). Furthermore, the robot would either make 20% errors or 4096 errors (error rate) in the coUaborative game. We automatically measured the praising and punishing behavior of the participants towards the robot and also asked the participant to estimate their own behavior. Results show that even the presence of the robot in the room did not convince all participants that they played together with the robot To gain full insight into this hwnan-robot relationship it might be m~ces· sary to directly interact with the robot. The participants unconsciously praised AIBO more than the human partner, but punished it just as much. Robots that adapt to the users' behavior should therefore pay extra attention to the users' praises, compared to their pWlishments.