Does the Correspondence Bias Apply to Social Robots?: Dispositional and Situational Attributions of Human Versus Robot Behavior

Human Agent ◽

Robot Behavior ◽

And Behaviors ◽

Increasingly, people interact with embodied machine communicators and are challenged to understand their natures and behaviors. The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE, sometimes referred to as the correspondence bias) is the tendency for individuals to over-emphasize personality-based or dispositional explanations for other people’s behavior while under-emphasizing situational explanations. This effect has been thoroughly examined with humans, but do people make the same causal inferences when interpreting the actions of a robot? As compared to people, social robots are less autonomous and agentic because their behavior is wholly determined by humans in the loop, programming, and design choices. Nonetheless, people do assign robots agency, intentionality, personality, and blame. Results of an experiment showed that participants made correspondent inferences when evaluating both human and robot speakers, attributing their behavior to underlying attitudes even when it was clearly coerced. However, they committed a stronger correspondence bias in the case of the robot–an effect driven by the greater dispositional culpability assigned to robots committing unpopular behavior–and they were more confident in their attitudinal judgments of robots than humans. Results demonstrated some differences in the global impressions of humans and robots based on behavior valence and choice. Judges formed more generous impressions of the robot agent when its unpopular behavior was coerced versus chosen; a tendency not displayed when forming impressions of the human agent. Implications of attributing robot behavior to disposition, or conflating robot actors with their actions, are addressed.

ACTORS AND OBSERVERS: DIVERGENT ATTRIBUTIONS OF CONSTRAINED UNFRIENDLY BEHAVIOR

Social Behavior and Personality An International Journal ◽

10.2224/sbp.2001.29.1.87 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 87-104

Author(s):

Eric M. Hansen ◽

Charles E. Kimble ◽

David W. Biers

Keyword(s):

Interpersonal Relations ◽

Psychology Students ◽

Introductory Psychology ◽

Interpersonal Behavior ◽

Same Sex ◽

Causal Inferences ◽

Correspondence Bias ◽

Observer Bias ◽

In light of previous attribution research, the authors investigated whether individuals make different causal inferences about their own, as opposed to other people's, constrained interpersonal behavior. Fifty-seven male and 59 female introductory psychology students were randomly assigned to act either friendly or unfriendly as they interacted with a same-sex confederate whose behavior was also constrained. Participants assessed their own, and the confederates', behavior during the interaction and general dispositions. Consistent with previous research on the correspondence bias or fundamental attribution error, and the actor-observer bias, dispositional influences played a more prominent role in participants' attributions concerning the confederates. behavior than their own. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed, as are the implications of these findings on interpersonal relations.

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications - Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics ◽

Who or What is to Blame? Personality and Situational Attributions of Robot Behavior

10.3233/faia200957 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Autumn Edwards ◽

Chad Edwards

Keyword(s):

Social Robot ◽

Current Experiment ◽

Robot Behavior ◽

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.

The Fundamental Attribution Error in Human-Robot Interaction: An Experimental Investigation on Attributing Responsibility to a Social Robot for Its Pre-Programmed Behavior

International Journal of Social Robotics ◽

10.1007/s12369-021-00856-9 ◽

2022 ◽

Author(s):

Aike C. Horstmann ◽

Nicole C. Krämer

Keyword(s):

Experimental Investigation ◽

Attribution Theory ◽

Social Robots ◽

Social Robot ◽

Human Robot Interaction ◽

Robot Interaction ◽

Online Study ◽

The Social ◽

AbstractSince social robots are rapidly advancing and thus increasingly entering people’s everyday environments, interactions with robots also progress. For these interactions to be designed and executed successfully, this study considers insights of attribution theory to explore the circumstances under which people attribute responsibility for the robot’s actions to the robot. In an experimental online study with a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects design (N = 394), people read a vignette describing the social robot Pepper either as an assistant or a competitor and its feedback, which was either positive or negative during a subsequently executed quiz, to be generated autonomously by the robot or to be pre-programmed by programmers. Results showed that feedback believed to be autonomous leads to more attributed agency, responsibility, and competence to the robot than feedback believed to be pre-programmed. Moreover, the more agency is ascribed to the robot, the better the evaluation of its sociability and the interaction with it. However, only the valence of the feedback affects the evaluation of the robot’s sociability and the interaction with it directly, which points to the occurrence of a fundamental attribution error.

Methodological Errors in Attitude Attribution Paradigm and Their Possible Consequences in Fundamental Attribution Error and Correspondence Bias: Biased Response and Reduced Confidence in Attitude Judgments

한국심리학회지 사회및성격 ◽

10.21193/kjspp.2018.32.4.003 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 32 (4) ◽

pp. 41-64

Author(s):

김태익 ◽

박선웅

Keyword(s):

Correspondence Bias ◽

Methodological Errors ◽

Fundamental Attribution Error/Correspondence Bias

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0114 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Glenn D. Reeder

Keyword(s):

Correspondence Bias ◽

Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error is dead, long live the correspondence bias

European Review of Social Psychology ◽

10.1080/10463280440000026 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 183-217 ◽

Cited By ~ 65

Author(s):

Bertram Gawronski

Keyword(s):

Bias Correction ◽

Correspondence Bias ◽

Fundamental Attribution Error

Moral Acrobatics ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190057657.003.0014 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 75-78

Author(s):

Philippe Rochat

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Economic Resources ◽

Moral Judgments ◽

Correspondence Bias ◽

Social Domain ◽

The Social ◽

Attribution Error ◽

The Individual

We live in a world that is greatly imagined and made of quick and dirty inferences, especially in the social domain that is mined with moral heuristics and other quick moral judgments. A major moral drift is the so-called fundamental attribution error or correspondence bias. This error consists in the propensity to erroneously explain and attribute strongly biased causes to the behaviors of self and others. At least in our individualistic Western cultures, we tend to make attribution and explain our as well as others’ behavior mainly in terms of dispositional features of the individual and much less in terms of the situation in which the person is embedded (e.g., her social class, economic resources, place in society, etc.).