The effect of group size on people's attitudes and cooperative behaviors toward robots in interactive gameplay

This paper contributes to the study of interaction between groups of people and groups of robots by examining the effect of group size on people's attitudes and behaviors toward robots as interaction partners. Our work is motivated by psychological research on human intergroup dynamics, particularly the interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect, which suggest that interactions among groups are more competitive than interactions among individuals. To test the discontinuity effect in the context of human-robot interaction, we conducted a between-subjects experiment with four conditions, derived by differentiating the ratio of humans to robots in the interaction (one or two humans interacting with one or two robots). Participants played a game with robots in which they were given a chance to exhibit competitive and cooperative behaviors, which we tracked. We also measured changes in participants' attitudes toward robots following gameplay. Our results show that people playing in groups behave more competitively towards the robots than individual human players. However, participants' attitudes toward robots did not change after the short-term interaction.