Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this experiment, we investigated how a robot’s violation ofseveral social norms influences human engagement with andperception of that robot. Each participant in our study (n = 80)played 30 rounds of rock-paper-scissors with a robot. In thethree experimental conditions, the robot violated a social normby cheating, cursing, or insulting the participant during game-play. In the control condition, the robot conducted a non-normviolating behavior by stretching its hand. During the game,we found that participants had strong emotional reactions toall three social norm violations. However, participants spokemore words to the robot only after it cheated. After the game,participants were more likely to describe the robot as an agentonly if they were in the cheating condition. These results implythat while social norm violations do elicit strong immediate re-actions, only cheating elicits a significantly stronger prolongedperception of agency.