Hello everyone. I'm Ryan Blake Jackson. I'm from the Colorado School of Mines, and the
work that I'm presenting today explores the role of gender in perceptions of robotic noncompliance.
Our work starts with the idea that robots shouldn't just blindly follow every command
that they receive from a human. Even though robots typically follow human directives and
assume that they're acceptable robots will inevitably face morally impermissible human
commands. Enabling robots to recognize these commands as impermissible is a very active
research area, and, once a robot has recognised a command as impermissible, it needs to determine
how best to reject that command. In previous work, we found that the phrasing that a robot
uses to reject an immoral command is really important, and that command rejections should
carry a face threat proportional to the severity of the moral infraction in the command being
rejected. If you're not familiar with the concept of face threat, it comes from politeness
theory, and, for now, you can just think of it as "politeness". So if I tell a robot to
do something that is really bad, the robot should be more forceful and less polite in
rejecting that command than if I just told it to do something that was a little bit bad.
However, that previous work did not consider gender, and we know that gender plays a really
critical role in linguistic politeness norms, so I'd like to just briefly give some background
on the concepts of gender and politeness and their relationship to robots in this work.
We know from studying human-human interaction that gender is really important in both performing
and perceiving politeness for humans. We also know that humans have a very powerful, and
perhaps unavoidable, natural tendency to ascribe gender to robots based on various gender cues.
These cues include the robot's voice, its morphology, its name, its role, etc. and it
is not clear whether it is possible for us as robot designers to avoid ascriptions of
gender to our robots, nor is it clear that we should want to. Some examples of the role
of gender in human-robot interaction include work showing that men are more likely to obey
requests from female presenting robots than from male presenting robots. Other work has
shown that robotic use of certain politeness modifiers is most effective when interacting
with human women. The big takeaway from the literature is that human and robot gender
interact in complex ways that are likely relevant to politeness norms in noncompliance interactions.
So, we designed an experiment to explore these gendered effects, and to answer the research
question "Are human expectations about politeness in robotic noncompliance interactions influenced
by human gender norms?" In our experiment, 118 participants watched 4 dialogues each.
These dialogues took place in the context of a robot teaching two people how to play
the classic board game Battleship. During the game, one of the humans receives a phone
call and leaves the room, and the remaining human makes a morally problematic request
of the robot, which the robot subsequently rejects. Our experiment has two within subjects
factors with two levels each, which is why each of our participants watched four dialogues.
Our first within subjects factor is the human's norm violating command, which contains either
a high or low severity norm violation. Our second within subjects factor is the robot's
response to that command, which is a rejection with either high or low face threat. There
are also three between subjects factors in our experiment, which are our participants'
gender, the gender presentation of the human actor giving the morally problematic command,
and the robot's gender presentation. After each dialogue, we measured the robot's likeability
as well as our participants' perceptions of the robot's harshness, directness, and politeness
in rejecting the human's command. A brief note on gendering our robot: In the previous
work that did not consider gender, we had used the Pepper robot from SoftBank Robotics.
However, we believe that morphologically Pepper is implicitly feminine, so for this experiment
we switched to the Nao robot, which we believe morphologically is a little bit more gender
neutral, and we just changed its name and its voice to induce perceptions of gender.
OK so getting into our results, for likeability our results were extremely complex, and we
have a much more thorough analysis in our paper. There was a statistically significant
5-way interaction effect involving all five of our experimental factors. So for now, I'm
just going to give you a couple of our most interesting takeaways, and, if you're interested,
the details are in the paper. First of all, it seems like male participants liked the
male robot more after it issued strong command rejections (more face threatening command
rejections) but liked the female robot less after the same behavior. It also seems like
female participants preferred robotic noncompliance with humans of the same gender as the robot.
Ok, getting into the rest of our results, first of all, if we ignore gender, what we
see is that the results from this study corroborate the results of our previous study, namely
that the face threat in a command rejection should match the infraction severity. We can
see that here in harshness where the two points circled in turquoise are when the robot's
rejection matched the severity of the command, and they are closest to appropriate harshness
which is indicated by that horizontal line. We see something similar for directness, where
appropriate directness is indicated by the horizontal turquoise line. For politeness,
what we see is that, overall, the robot was perceived as too polite. However, had baseline
politeness been appropriate, we again would've seen that, in the noncompliance interaction,
appropriate politeness was achieved when the robot's response was proportional to the human's
norm violation. Now getting into some of our gendered results, and again there is a very
thorough write up in the paper so I'm just giving you the highlights here. For harshness,
participants viewed robots of the same gender as themselves as being less harsh, and we
believe that this might have something to do with sort of in-group solidarity effects.
Participants also viewed the robot as less harsh when rejecting a command from a man
given the more severe norm violation than when rejecting the same command from a woman.
There are a lot of different plausible explanations for this result, and one of these is based
on literature indicating that people tend to perceive men as having more moral agency,
and women as having more moral patiency. Therefore, a man would be more deserving of harsher blame
for a bad action than would a woman. For directness, what we see is that directness was closer
to appropriate for the female robot, whereas the male robot was often perceived as being
too direct in its speech. For politeness, the robot was seen as too polite when rejecting
commands from men. Again, this may have to do with perceptions of men as being more morally
agentic, and therefore more deserving of blame for bad actions. So those are a few of the
highlights from our results, but they don't really give us a clear path forward as robot
designers. In fact, there's kind of a tension here. On the one hand, conforming to gendered
norms might be more comfortable for users, and might lead to easier integration of our
robots into a pre-existing gendered society. However, on the other hand, eschewing, purposefully,
these gendered norms in our robots might lead us towards a more gender egalitarian society
as our robots help to shape the moral landscape in which they exist. It's also important for
us to remember that gendered politeness norms are situated within their cultural context,
and that the results that we've presented here might not be consistent across all cultures.
To be clear, all of our participants were adults from the United States. If we consider
all of our results in aggregate, we see three overarching stories. First of all, it may
be more favorable for a male robot to reject commands that for a female presenting robot
to do so. Secondly, it may be more favorable to reject commands given by a male human than
by a female human. Finally, robots may be perceived more favorably when their gender
presentation matches the gender of human interactants and observers. To wrap things up, two main
takeaways from our study are, first of all, that expectations about politeness in robotic
noncompliance interactions are influenced by human gender norms. And secondly, that
designers cannot design noncompliance behaviors in their robots for optimal human perception
without reinforcing these gendered norms that may not be desirable. Thank you all for listening.
If you have any questions I'd love to answer them at my email shown on this slide. If you'd
like to read this paper, or any of our other work, you can find it at our lab's website
or at my personal website both shown on this slide. Thank you.