Insulting robot squashed human performance
Insulting robot squashed human performance
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, have created
a ‘trash talking’ robot that reduces human performance while playing the game
‘Guards of Treasures’.
Engineers
ensured the robot, named Pepper, used mild insults such as; “I have to say you
are a terrible player,” and “over the course of the game your playing has
become confused.” Even though the robot used such mild language, humans who
played a game with the robot performed worse while being insulted and better when
being encourage.
Aaron Roth, lead
author, said that some of the 40 study participants were technically
sophisticated and fully understood that the machine was the source of their
discomfort.
“One participant
said, ‘I don’t like what the robot is saying, but that’s the way it was
programmed so I can’t blame it,'” said Roth, who conducted the study while he
was a master’s student in the CMU Robotics Institute.
The research
team discovered that human performance ebbed regardless of the individual’s
sophistication. “This is one of the first studies of human-robot interaction in
an environment where they are not cooperating,” said co-author Fei Fang, an
assistant professor in the Institute for Software Research.
Fang continued:
“We can expect home assistants to be cooperative…but in situations such as
online shopping, they may not have the same goals as we do.”
The researchers
of this study wanted to explore the uses of game theory and
bounded rationality in the context of robots. They designed a study in which
humans would compete against a robot in a game called ‘Guards of Treasures’.
This is a typical game used to study defender-attacker interaction in research
on security games.
Each participant
of the study played the game 35 times with the robot. Although the human
players’ rationality improved as the number of games played increased, those
who were criticised by the robot didn’t score as well as those who were
praised.
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