Stimuli
In order to examine how we humans react when we are interacting with non-human agents, you must somehow expose human participants for non-human agents. This can be done in several different ways – and it is indeed done in different ways in existing research. One approach is that the researcher capitalizes on people’s real experience of having interacted with non-human agents and asks questions about such real experiences. This is done in many studies (including some studies in the project Interactions with Artificial Humans). One disadvantage, however, is that not so many individuals have this experience, particularly when it comes to advanced service robots. Therefore, another approach is that the researcher deliberately creates non-human agents for the purpose of using them in his/her studies. This is also common in existing research. Within this approach, there are many possible options. And we do not yet know the full consequences of these options when it comes to people’s reactions. For example, some researchers show participants a photo of a robot as a means to set in motion some kind of reaction, while others create a laboratory situation in which
participants interact individually, in real time and on a face-to-face basis, with some non-human agent. In the project Interactions with Artificial Humans, several studies have been conducted with something that is somewhere in between these two options from a realism point of view: participants are shown videos (created for the research project) of humans who interact with non-humans, and the participants are asked about their reactions with respect to
what they see in the video. One example is this video that was used to examine participants’ reactions to a robot that can think aloud while it is carrying out tasks:
