Social Bonding Increases Unsolicited Helpfulness Towards A Bullied Robot

This paper is a first step towards the investigation of civil courage in human-robot interaction (HRI). The main research question is if human users would help a robot being bullied by other humans. Previous work showed that pro-social behavior can be induced in human users towards a robot pro-actively asking for their help in order to accomplish a specific task by applying mechanisms of social bonding. In contrast, this paper investigates unsolicited helpful behavior towards a robot being bullied by a third person subsequent to an interaction task. To this end, social bonding in terms of small talk including explicit emotional adaptation to induce a feeling of similarity is applied to a human-robot dialog scenario in a user study. As an interaction context, a cooperative object classification task is chosen, where a robot reads objects from a list needed by the robot to fulfill another task later. To induce bullying behavior, the list is took away from the robot by a disturbing third person after the completed interaction. The two experimental conditions of the study differ in whether or not social bonding is applied prior to the interaction. According to previous work, results showed increased ratings for social presence and anthropomorphism, as well as increased unsolicited helpfulness of the participants in the social bonding condition. Surprisingly, unsolicited help occurred only verbally and directed towards the robot and none of the human users took action against the bullying third person. It is discussed, that this may be due to social-psychological side-effects caused by the passive presence of the human experimental examiner and that additional channels of emotional adaptation by the robot may be required.