Abstract
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.
Highlights
The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for others’ behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations (Ross, 1977)
This effect has been thoroughly examined with humans, we do not know if the same correspondence bias will apply to social robots
Because much of the literature uses both FAE and correspondence bias, we will use the terminology cited in the mentioned studies
Summary
The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for others’ behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations (Ross, 1977). This effect has been thoroughly examined with humans, we do not know if the same correspondence bias will apply to social robots. People do assign robots agency, intentionality, and blame (Sciutti et al, 2013; De Graaf and Malle, 2019; Banks, 2020). The purpose of this experiment is to determine whether people commit the FAE in response to the behaviors of a social robot. Whereas the FAE assumes a general tendency to underestimate the power of situation on human behavior, the correspondence bias refers more narrowly to the tendency to make disposition-congruent inferences of observed behavior. Because much of the literature uses both FAE and correspondence bias, we will use the terminology cited in the mentioned studies
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