A new study has shown that seeing a robot being bullied or, on the contrary, treated very kindly, people reacted in the same way as if they were doing the same with a living person.
We are increasingly exposed to robots in our daily lives, however, little is known about how these realistic machines affect human emotions. In two new studies, scientists tried to determine how a person responds when interacting with a robot on an emotional and neurological level.
In the first study, the volunteers were shown videos, in one of which a small robot - a dinosaur was hugged and tickled, and in another he was beaten and thrown.
The scientists then measured people's physiological arousal levels after watching the video by recording their skin's conductivity (a measure of how well the skin conducts electricity). When a person experiences strong emotions, he sweats more and the conductivity of the skin increases.
The volunteers reported experiencing negative emotions while watching a video about the violence against a robot. Meanwhile, their skin's conductance also increased significantly, thus indicating that they were under stress.
In the second study, experts used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to visualize participants' brain activity while watching videos of human-robot interaction.
Again, the participants were shown a video of a person, a robot, and this time an inanimate object, which was treated affectionately or rudely.
For example, in one of the videos, a man beat a woman and tried to strangle her with a plastic bag. In another video, a man was doing the same with a robot.
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Affectionate treatment of both the robot and the person, as shown by MRI scans, led to similar neural activity in areas of the limbic system of the brain (the system is responsible for processing emotions).
However, when the volunteers watched the bullying, in this case, they felt more empathy for the human rather than the robot.
"We believe that, in general, handling a robot elicits almost the same emotional response as handling a human," says study lead author Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten of the Universität Duisburg -Essen) in Germany. "However, we still have more sympathy for the person."
However, the scientists only assessed the immediate response to emotional cues. "We don't know what might be happening in the short term."
"It is not surprising that humans show compassion for the robot, because robots look and behave like humans or animals," says robot technician Alexander Reben, who was not involved in the study.
He himself builds small cardboard robots that make humans feel very good.
Some experts talk about the strong relativity of a person's empathy for a robot. However, Reben talks about trends in the development of robots, comparing them to the domestication of dogs. “We've been doing this for millennia. I believe this is what we are doing with robots now."
Humans show empathy for robots in a wide variety of situations and contexts. For example, soldiers on the battlefield find themselves emotionally connected to robots.
Other studies have shown that humans show more empathy for robots the more realistic they seem, but not if they are "too human."
As robots become more prevalent, understanding the interaction between humans and robots will become increasingly important.
The results of the new study will be presented in June at the International Communication Association Conference in London.