Effects of task structure and attribution target on responsibility attributions in human–robot interaction

Abstract

Responsibility attribution refers to beliefs about the cause of an event or outcome. This study investigates the effects of cooperation and competition on responsibility attributions after success and failure in human–robot interaction. A 2 × 2 × 2 mixed-design experiment was conducted, with task structure (cooperation vs. competition) and attribution target (self vs. robot) as within-subject variables and task outcome (win vs. lose) as a between-subject variable. Forty students from a university campus participated in the experiment. They cooperated with or competed against a humanoid robot in a picture memory game whose outcome either exceeded (success) or did not reach (failure) an expected outcome. Afterward, participants allocated the causal responsibility between themselves and the humanoid robot for a specified performance success or failure. It was found that participants attributed more responsibility for success to themselves than to the humanoid robot, and such self-serving bias was greater in competitive than in cooperative structures. Additionally, participants attributed more responsibility for failure to themselves than to the humanoid robot in cooperative structures but not in competitive structures. Moreover, the competitiveness index of unsuccessful participants moderated the relationship between the task structure and the differential responsibility attribution between the self and the robot. Furthermore, participants evaluated the humanoid robot more positively in cooperative than competitive structures. Finally, participants had higher accuracy in cooperative structures, although they subjectively perceived that they performed better in competitive structures. These findings provide insight to guide people's attributional behavior, task performance, and evaluation of robots in the desired manner from the perspective of task structure design.