Affiliation:
1. Communication and Social Robotics Labs, Western Michigan University, USA
Abstract
The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for others’ behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations. Compared to people, current robots are less agentic and autonomous and more driven by programming, design, and humans-in-the-loop. People do nonetheless assign them agency and intentionality and blame. The purpose of the current experiment is to determine whether people commit the FAE in response to the behaviors of a social robot.