Affective Embodied Agents and Their Effect on Decision Making

Abstract

Embodied agents, such as avatars and social robots, are increasingly incorporating a capacity to enact affective states and recognize the mood of their interlocutor. This influences how users perceive these technologies and how they interact with them. We report on an experiment aimed at assessing perceived empathy and fairness among individuals interacting with avatars and robots when compared to playing against a computer or a fellow human being. Twenty-one individuals were asked to play the ultimatum game, playing the role of a responder against another person, a computer, an avatar and a robot for a total of 32 games (8 per condition). We hypothesize that affective expressions by avatars and robots influence the emotional state of the users, leading them to irrational behavior by rejecting unfair proposals. We monitored galvanic skin response and heart rate of the players in the period when the offer was made by the proposer until the decision was announced by the responder. Our results show that most fair offers were accepted while most unfair offers were rejected. However, participants rejected more very unfair offers made by people and computers than by the avatars or robots.

Keywords

• embodied agents
• emotion recognition
• game theory
• avatars
• social robots