Mind perception and causal attribution for failure in a game with a robot

Abstract

It is unclear how a human attributes the cause of failure to the robot in a human-robot interaction. We aim to identify the relationship between causal attribution and mind perception in a repeated game with an agent. We investigated causal attribution of the participant to the agent: which decision of the participant or the partner agent caused the unexpectedly small amount of the reward. We conducted experiments with three agent conditions: a human, robot, and computer. The results showed that the agency score negatively correlated with the degree of causal attribution to the partner agent. In particular, correlations of scores of “thought,” “memory,” “planning,” and “self-control” that are sub-items of agency were significant. This implied the impression that “the agent acted to succeed” might reduce causal attribution. In addition, we found that decrease in the scores of mind perception correlated with the degree of causal attribution to the partner agent. This suggests that a sense of betrayal of the prior expectation by the partner agent through the game might lead to causal attribution to the partner agent.