ABSTRACT
Social distancing policies such as limits on public gatherings and contact with others were utilized around the world to slow the spread of COVID-19. Yet, decreased social interactions may also threaten people's well-being. In this project, we sought to understand novelty-relevant experiences surrounding in-home companion robot pets for adults that were living in some degree of social isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After 6-weeks of participants living with the robot companion, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N = 9) and six themes emerged from our iterative analysis (expectations versus reality, ontological comparisons, interactions, third-party influence, identity, and comfort). Findings suggest that novelty is a complex phenomenon consisting of various elements (i.e., imagined novelty, technology novelty, and relational novelty). Each component influences the user's experience. Our findings also suggest that our understanding of novelty as a nonlinear resource may hold important implications for how we view human-robot relationships beyond initial encounters.
ABSTRACT
Cues delivered by agents are known to trigger mental shortcuts associated with ontological category or the kind of thing an agent is. Two such heuristics are key to considering organic and machine agents, and result in biased evaluations: the machine heuristic (MH) (if machine, then systematic/unbiased, therefore its products are good) and the nature heuristic (NH) (if natural, then pure/innate, therefore good). As machine agents such as robots are increasingly integrated into human spheres, it is yet unknown (a) if invocation of agent-cued heuristics is inherently tied to activities and (b) whether either/both heuristics are evoked when agents exhibit both organic and machinic properties (as with cyborgs). To investigate these open questions, a 3 × 2 experiment tasked individuals with considering a magazine article about an agent (organism, cyborg, robot) performing behaviors (natural, technical) to solve a widespread problem, and then evaluating the agent and its solution for markers of machine and NHs. Findings indicate that the NH may be dominant over the MH; however, this primacy may be driven by operational contexts. Post hoc analysis suggests that agent category grounds interpretations of agent behaviors that, in turn, drive biased evaluations of behavioral outcomes.
Subject(s)
Heuristics , Robotics , Adult , Cues , Female , Humans , Male , Middle AgedABSTRACT
Increasingly, people interact with embodied machine communicators and are challenged to understand their natures and behaviors. The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE, sometimes referred to as the correspondence bias) is the tendency for individuals to over-emphasize personality-based or dispositional explanations for other people's behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations. This effect has been thoroughly examined with humans, but do people make the same causal inferences when interpreting the actions of a robot? As compared to people, social robots are less autonomous and agentic because their behavior is wholly determined by humans in the loop, programming, and design choices. Nonetheless, people do assign robots agency, intentionality, personality, and blame. Results of an experiment showed that participants made correspondent inferences when evaluating both human and robot speakers, attributing their behavior to underlying attitudes even when it was clearly coerced. However, they committed a stronger correspondence bias in the case of the robot-an effect driven by the greater dispositional culpability assigned to robots committing unpopular behavior-and they were more confident in their attitudinal judgments of robots than humans. Results demonstrated some differences in the global impressions of humans and robots based on behavior valence and choice. Judges formed more generous impressions of the robot agent when its unpopular behavior was coerced versus chosen; a tendency not displayed when forming impressions of the human agent. Implications of attributing robot behavior to disposition, or conflating robot actors with their actions, are addressed.
ABSTRACT
Based on an analysis of articles in health communication journals and in regional, national, and international communication journals, this study identifies publication trends and research priorities for health communication articles in the 1990s and the year 2000. Based on a content analysis of article abstracts, researchers determined the extent to which health communication articles appeared in various journals as well as the emphasis on specific topics in health communication research, methodological approaches, and theoretical frameworks. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this study for future work in the area of health communication.
