Abstract
This paper will focus on the establishment of a social event that refers in our case study to a social android robot simulating interaction with human users. Within an open-field study setting, we observed a shifting of interactive behavior, presence setting and agency ascription by the human users toward the robot, operating in parallel with the robots’ different modulations of activity. The activity modes of the robot range from a simple idling state, to a reactive facetrack condition and finally an interactive teleoperated condition. By relating the three types of activity modes with three types of (increasing social) presence settings—ranging from co-location, to co-presence and finally to social presence—we observed modulations in the human users’ interactive behavior as well as modulations of agency ascription toward the robot. The observations of the behavioral shift in the human users toward the robot lead us to the assumption that a fortification of agency ascription toward the robot goes hand in hand with the increase in its social activity modes as well as its display of social presence features.
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Notes
The tendency of personification and the anthropomorphic use of terms in Human–Technology Interaction are also described by Tietel (1995).
HCI stands for human–computer interaction and HRI for human–robot interaction.
In social scientific literature the focus on social agents is set on modern, functionally differentiated societies offering an anthropocentric viewpoint by justifying humans as uniquely and as legally accepted social agents (see Lindemann 2005; Luckmann 1970). In contrast to the distinctions of modern society, excluding other potential agents besides human agents, certain social–theoretical approaches emphasize the self-generative and self-selective notion of social agents to process social units regardless of societies’ limitations (for the self-generative notion of systems see Bateson 2006). Besides Luhmann’s theory of Social Systems (1984), Plessner’s philosophic-anthropological concept of ‘excentric positionality’ (1975) allows one to overcome the anthropocentric view by a ‘reflexive anthropology,’ and to focus on the self-generative aspect of social units in contrast to its non-social environment.
The content, extension, intensity of the interaction, as well as the resulting relationship of the agents are not predetermined or formalized; instead the process of social interaction is emergent and self-generative.
The notion of mutually shared situations and the resulting aspect of a common relation as ‘Wirbeziehung’ are also described by Schuetz (1981:227f.).
Giddens (1984) chooses the term ‘unfocussed attention’ for the same instance.
Busily typing on mobile phones, reading newspapers, listening to music, and working with the computer are prime examples of parallel activities of potential social agents in physically shared interhuman settings.
Studies on sociality or communication events mostly focus on social presence situations without taking into account the other different levels of co-location and co-presence presented in this paper, which cause different degrees of social involvement.
Kieserling (1999) defines reciprocal perception with its component for co-defining a shared environmental situation as inferior and minimal value cases of sociality (in German ‘Minimalfall von Sozialität’).
Respectively, as referred to in Table 1, as ‘communicative sociality.’
In order to overcome language barriers, German quotations were translated into English in this paper.
Enfield and Levinson (2006) also determine culture, cognition, and interaction as ‘Roots of human sociality.’
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Acknowledgments
This study was made possible through the kind help of Hiroshi Ishiguro and Shuichi Nishio of ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, and supported by Grant-in Aid for Scientific Research (S), KAKENHI (20220002), supporting me with a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Furthermore, the study was supported by the ARS Electronica staff and the management of the Café Cubus in Linz, who provided the settings for the experiments. We are grateful to the experimental helpers, visitors and volunteer workers during the exhibition of Geminoid HI-1 at the Café Cubus and the ARS Electronica Building. For critical comments and discussions I am thankful to the members of the project ‘Development of Humanoid and Service Robots: An International Comparative Research Project—Europe and Japan,’ funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Last but not least I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on this article.
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Straub, I. ‘It looks like a human!’ The interrelation of social presence, interaction and agency ascription: a case study about the effects of an android robot on social agency ascription. AI & Soc 31, 553–571 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0632-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0632-5