Social and psychological reactions to receiving help from a robot

  • Authors:

  • Cristen Torrey

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Computer systems, including humanoid robots, are becoming capable of recognizing human activity and, in the future, may offer unsolicited help in a variety of contexts. This helpfulness may improve people's performance on certain tasks, but there could be negative social and psychological consequences. Help recipients may feel vulnerable--that their self-esteem and their control over the task have been threatened. To better understand the social psychological impact of receiving help from a robot, this thesis explores strategies used in human-human conversation to deliver unsolicited help and observes participants' reactions to these strategies in human-robot dialogue.