Actions, not Actor Identities, Affect Beliefs About Cooperation in Human-Machine Teaming

Abstract

The efficacy of future human-machine teams will be determined by the ability of machine agents to work cooperatively with their human teammates. The ways teammates engage in cooperative teamwork behaviors might affect human beliefs about expressed cooperativity, and these changes in beliefs might depend on the identity of a teammate as a human or machine. In the current experiment we investigated how violations of cooperation expectations, presented to participants in a narrative vignette, influenced ratings on a measure of cooperation derived from social interdependence theory. As expected, participants rated vignette actors as less cooperative if the story included violated cooperation expectations, but consistent with previous research, the identities of the actors as humans or robots did not appear to influence ratings. Overall, this is a useful expansion on previous work describing the factors that influence perceptions of cooperation in human-machine teaming.