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Explaining Before or After Acting? How the Timing of Self-Explanations Affects User Perception of Robot Behavior

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13086))

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Abstract

Explanations are a useful tool to improve human-robot interaction and the topic of what a good explanation should entail has received much attention. While a robot’s behavior can be justified upon request after its execution, the intention to act can also be signaled by a robot prior to the execution. In this paper we report results from a pre-registered study on the effects of a social robot proactively giving a self-explanation before vs. after the execution of an undesirable behavior. Contrary to our expectations we found that explaining a behavior before its execution did not yield positive effects on the users’ perception of the robot or the behavior. Instead, the robot’s behavior was perceived as less desirable when explained before the execution rather than afterwards. Exploratory analyses further revealed that even though participants felt less uncertain about what was going to happen next, they also felt less in control, had lower trust and lower contact intentions with a robot that explained before it acted.

This research was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the project ‘VIVA’ (FKZ 16SV7959).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://aspredicted.org/dc6db.pdf.

  2. 2.

    Please note that this enumeration is partially inconsistent with the pre-registered hypothesis.

  3. 3.

    Original videos: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3319502.3374802#sec-supp.

  4. 4.

    https://www.soscisurvey.de/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/pepper.

  6. 6.

    www.mturk.com.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Sonja Stange & Stefan Kopp

Authors
  1. Sonja Stange
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  2. Stefan Kopp
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sonja Stange .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic and Communication Engineering, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Engineering, Singapore, Singapore

    Haizhou Li

  2. The National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

  3. A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Yan Wu

  4. Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy

    Agnieszka Wykowska

  5. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

  6. Qingdao University, Qingdao, China

    Xiaorui Liu

  7. School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beihang University, Beijing, Beijing, China

    Dongyu Li

  8. Social Cognition Human-Robot Interaction, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy

    Jairo Perez-Osorio

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Stange, S., Kopp, S. (2021). Explaining Before or After Acting? How the Timing of Self-Explanations Affects User Perception of Robot Behavior. In: Li, H., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13086. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-90524-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-90525-5

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