Social Facilitation with Non-Human Agents: Possible or not?

Abstract

As interactions with non-human agents increase, it is important to understand and predict the consequences of human interactions with them. Social facilitation has a longstanding history within the realm of social psychology and is characterized by the presence of other humans having a beneficial effect on performance on easy tasks and inhibiting performance on difficult tasks. While social facilitation has been shown across task types and experimental conditions with human agents, very little research has examined whether this effect can also be induced by non-human agents and, if so, to what degree the level of humanness and embodiment of those agents influences that effect. In the current experiment, we apply a common social facilitation task (i.e., numerical distance judgments) to investigate to what extent the presence of agents of varying degrees of humanness benefits task performance. Results show a significant difference in performance between easy and difficult task conditions, but show no significant improvement in task performance in the social presence conditions compared to performing the task alone. This suggests that the presence of others did not have a positive effect on performance, at least not when social presence was manipulated via still images. Implications of this finding for future studies, as well as for human-robot interaction are discussed.