Three tips from a social psychologist for building a social robot

For humanists, artists, and social scientists, the social robot becomes a mirror, reflecting desires and ambitions, changing notions of selves and the boundaries between humans and non-humans. Not surprisingly, the social robot also creates paradoxes. Although efforts to model the human mind on the basis of computers are still widespread, minds are not like computers. Memory, for example, is reconstructed, not accessed. Action flows from perception. Social psychologists distinguish between folk psychology - a model of human mind and action widely shared in a society - and scientific psychology, which we can call the study of how humans create such models. Building social robots will probably require using both folk and scientific ideas about human beings. This paper describes some counter-intuitive experimental findings from social psychology and offers a few tips for building a social robot