Abstract
This article introduces a new communicational format called Fair Proxy Communication. Fair Proxy Communication is a specific communicational setting in which a teleoperated robot is used to remove perceptual cues of implicit biases in order to increase the perceived fairness of decision-related communications. The envisaged practical applications of Fair Proxy Communication range from assessment communication (e.g. job interviews at Affirmative Action Employers) to conflict mediation, negotiation and other communication scenarios that require direct dialogue but where decision-making maybe negatively affected by implicit social biases. The theoretical significance of Fair Proxy Communication pertains primarily to the investigation of 'mechanisms' of implicit social cognition in neuropsychology, but this new communicational format also raises many research questions for the fields of organisational psychology, negotiation and conflict research and business ethics. Fair Proxy Communication is currently investigated by an interdisciplinary research team at Aarhus University, Denmark.
Highlights
Fair Proxy Communication has been described in greater detail in 2016 in the context of a grant application for Integrative Social Robotics, a new approach to research, design and development of applications of robots in social interaction contexts
Even though the basic idea of Fair Proxy Communication is independent of this approach, it can serve as a prime illustration of its potential benefits
"Social robotics" and "Human-Robot-Interaction Studies" are fairly young interdisciplinary research areas exploring the phenomena of human interactions with so-called 'social robots.' So far, both areas have been conducted with limited interdisciplinary scope, involving mainly robotics, psychology, geronotology and education science, but the Humanities and social sciences are not yet fully involved
Summary
The aim of this paper is to introduce the communicational format called "Fair Proxy Communication". The two top values that drive the research, design and development process for the robotics application we call Fair Proxy Communication are social justice and peace These two values demarcate the main areas of concrete practical use of FPC as we currently envisage it. Social robots offer a unique opportunity systematically and independently to vary the values of all those parameters that may be relevant for certain aspects of social cognition – e.g. degree of linguistic mirroring, gaze following, synchronisation of type and speed of body language, degree of human-like shape and voice, degree of gender, degree of epistemic alignment, degree of expression of emotions etc.; they can be used to create verifiable and reliably repeatable data variations; they allow for direct interaction in 3D physical space, which increases ecological validity. The third element of the Fair Proxy effect is of particular interest
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