I'm D.D. Allan
and in this video I'm going to summarise our paper, Better than Us The Role of Implicit
Self-Theories in Determining Perceived Threat Responses in HRI.
Which was conducted in collaboration with Andy Vonasch and Christoph Bartneck.
First, I'm going to define perceived threat.
Next, I'll discuss implicit self-theory, finally, I'm going to put it all together
and outline some of the results and contributions of an experiment, we ran in order to assess
the role of implicit self-theories in determining perceived threat responses.
Before I do that I'd like to invite you to read the paper.
It includes far more detail than I could possibly cover in this short presentation.
As well, it offers access to supplementary material such as our data set, and stimuli, and
other interesting bonus materials that you might find interesting.
So what is Perceived threat?
Perceived threat also known as threat perception, is a popular research theme in the field
of HRI.
The basic premise is as follows: machines that are increasingly humanlike and/or highly
capable, simultaneously threaten human safety and resources, also known as realistic threat,
as well as human uniqueness and identity also known as identity threat.
Several findings on the impact of perceived threat bear mentioning.
First, robots perceived to outperform humans on a variety of physical and mental tasks
increase feelings of threat.
This is because human beings view such robots as members of a highly competent outgroup,
and thus plausible competition for resources and jobs, as well as, threats to human identity
and distinctiveness.
Second, autonomous robots, specifically, robots capable of disregarding human commands,
are considered to be particularly threatening.
This is due in part because humans perceive a sense of loss or control over
such robots.
Third, and somewhat relatedly, researchers studying the Google DeepMind Challenge, AlphaGo vs.
Lee Sedol, have reported that participants who viewed the challenge, experienced not
only threats to human distinctiveness and resources, but a sense of helplessness.
They also found that human intellectual comparisons with machine comparisons, decreased
motivation towards intellectual tasks.
The growing research interest in perceived threat has given rise to an important question
what are the psychological determinants of threat perception?
In our study, we proposed that an individual's implicit self-theory, that is their underlying beliefs
about whether self-attributes such as intelligence are changeable or fixed could be an important
determinant of perceived threat.
But what is implicit self-theory?
Implicit self-theories, henceforth, ISTs, also referred to as mindsets, and popularised
in Carol Dweck's 2008 book, Mindset, are underlying beliefs people hold about the malleability
or fixedness of self-attributes, for example intelligence or personality.
There are two kinds of ISTs, the incremental theory and the entity theory.
Those who hold an incremental theory, incremental theorists, assume that self-attributes are
mutable and amenable to change through self-development, effort, and education.
Whereas, those who hold an entity theory, entity theorists, assume that self-attributes are
largely fixed and unsusceptible to change.
Obviously, an exhaustive review over the IST, ah, literature here is impossible, but here are
a couple of characteristics that bear mentioning.
First, people tend to endorse one theory over the other either entity or incremental
theory, however the effects of which, tend to occur outside of awareness.
Second, while considered reasonably stable and able to be measured as a trait variable,
ISTs can be, and indeed frequently are, temporarily manipulated using scientific articles and
other experimental stimuli.
Third, and perhaps most relevant to our discussion today, is that an individual’s IST exerts a powerful
influence on the attributions they make with respect to others.
For instance, entity theorists, are prone to making stereotypical judgments about the
Attributes of others, and have even been found to display a significant increase in self-esteem
when promoting stereotypes.
Conversely, incremental theorists make fewer trait attributions, and rather base their
perceptions of people on the situation and environmental factors.
Of note, is that stereotyping has long been identified as a key component on the
formation of outgroup attributions.
And if you recall earlier, outgroup attributions have been linked to threat perception.
Additionally, in our recent work, we have demonstrated that entity theorists, relative
to incremental theorists, exhibit greater negative beliefs about robots.
Importantly, negative beliefs about robots have been linked to realistic and identity
threats.
Drawing on this literature, we theorized that an incremental theory will decrease—whereas
an entity theory will increase—perceptions of threat.
Now we actually had 5 hypotheses, which are discussed at length in the paper, but due
to space constraints, here I just want to focus on the two that directly relate to perceived
threat.
They are one
Incremental vs. entity theorists will rate robots in general as posing less vs. more
identity-relevant threats.
Two
Entity vs. incremental theorists will rate robots in general as posing more vs. less
realistic threats.
The experiment used a 2 implicit self-theory: entity vs. incremental X 3 feedback: social
comparison vs. improvement-oriented vs. control between-subjects factorial design.
Now I won't go into detail about what the feedback types mean because they don't relate
to the key hypotheses of interest, today.
Other than to say, that we were testing an unrelated hypothesis, in which we predicted
and found evidence of, a matching effect between self-theory and feedback type.
But you can learn all about that in the paper.
Now, the experiment was performed in four parts.
First, we experimentally primed participants’ ISTs, turning some towards incremental
and others towards an entity theory.
In the second part of the experiment, we exposed participants to a video of human quiz players
playing against, and losing to, an apparently autonomous intelligent robot.
Here's what that looked like.
The original doubting Thomas was a member of what group of people?
Baxter.
Apostles. Correct.
The motto on the flag of Brazil is in what language?
Rebecca. Portuguese.
Correct.
How many points does the star on the Heineken logo have?
Baxter.
Five.
Correct.
The book of secrets is the sequel to what Nicholas Cage film?
Jenny.
National Treasure.
Correct.
What trimester begins with the thirteen week of pregnancy?
Baxter.
Second.
Correct.
The Piraha tribe comes from what South American rainforest?
Baxter.
The Amazon.
Correct.
Aubhi Dhabi is the largest of what group of seven states?
The United Arab Emirates.
Correct.
In the third part of the experiment, participants were presented with feedback.
And again I encourage you to read the paper to learn what that's all about.
At the end of the study, participants were debriefed and compensated.
So what were the results?
As expected, incremental theorists perceived robots to be significantly less threatening
to human identity and human uniqueness.
This result supports our identity threat hypotheses.
With respect to realistic threat, as predicted, results revealed that entity theorists perceived
robots to pose significantly more threats to jobs and human resources.
Why do these results matter?
At a theoretical level, they expand the literature on perceived threat in HRI, by showing that
ISTs are an important variable underpinning perceived threat.
As well they extend our previous work on the influence of ISTs in HRI.
On a practical level, these findings may hold value for HRI designers and marketers.
Not to mention, open up some potentially important avenues for future work, all of which is outlined
in our paper.
To summarize, the findings of our study indicate that significant individual variability exists
with respect to perceived threat.
We show that some people, incremental theorists, are rather receptive to robots, that can both
physically and mentally outperform human beings.
In contrast, others, entity theorists, view such robots as threatening
These findings support our previous findings in showing that ISTs serves as an important variable in
determining how humans respond to robots.
Ok, so I encourage you to go ahead and get a copy of the paper, it includes a full account of our investigation,
and you can access all the supplementary and bonus material with that as well.
You can also reach out to me on the addresses on the screen.
Thank you for joining me.