Abstract
As our social interaction with artificial agents is expected to become more frequent, it is necessary to study the cognitive effects evoked or affected by these social interactions. Artificial agents come in all shapes and sizes, from vacuum cleaners to humanoid robots that in some cases can be difficult to distinguish from actual humans. Across this wide range of agents, different morphologies are believed to have different effects on humans in social interactions. Specifically, the extent to which an agent resembles a human has been shown to increase anthropomorphization, the tendency to attribute human characteristics to non-human agents or objects. From an evolutionary perspective, this response is completely reasonable, since for most of our existence as a species, if something looked like a human, it would almost always have behaved like one. However, this is not necessarily the case for artificial agents, whose intelligence can be implemented independently of morphology. In this chapter, we will review the cognitive and behavioral effects of anthropomorphization such as prosocial behavior, empathy, and altruism, as well as changes in subjective experience that can occur when interacting with human-resembling artificial agents. We will discuss results from behavioral experiments, economic games, and psychophysiological evidence. We will first give a review of the current state of the field before discussing some inconsistent findings, and shed light on areas that have been underinvestigated as of yet.
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Notes
- 1.
Reminding one of the same category mistakes famously illustrated by computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra: “The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.”
- 2.
However, it should be noted that this effect is moderated by absolute amount, e.g., Anderson et al. (2011) found that rejection rates approach zero as stake size increases.
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Vegt, B., de Kleijn, R. (2023). Cognitive Effects of the Anthropomorphization of Artificial Agents in Human–Agent Interactions. In: Mukherjee, S., Dutt, V., Srinivasan, N. (eds) Applied Cognitive Science and Technology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3966-4_3
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