Preventing Robot Abuse through Emotional Robot Responses

My research concerns group influence and prosocial behavior in a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) context. My collaborators and I created and ran an experiment (N = 30) to measure if the emotional responses of a group of robots could induce participants to take prosocial action against robot abuse. Participants completed a collaborative block-building task with a confederate, during which the confederate abused one robot after it made mistakes. We measured participants' responses to these events. The results of the study indicate that humans are more likely to prosocially intervene when the bystander robots react in sadness as opposed to when they ignore the abuse. They motivate further research on social influence and group dynamics within HRI.