People's Judgments of Human and Robot Behaviors: A Robust Set of Behaviors and Some Discrepancies

The emergence of robots in everyday life raises the question of how people explain the behavior of robots - -in particular, whether they explain robot behavior the same way as they explain human behavior. However, before we can examine whether peoples explanations differ for human and robot agents, we need to establish whether people judge basic properties of behavior similarly regardless of whether the behavior is performed by a human or a robot. We asked 239 participants to rate 78 behaviors on the properties of intentionality, surprisingness, and desirability. While establishing a pool of robust stimulus behaviors (whose properties are judged similarly for human and robot), we detected several behaviors that elicited markedly discrepant judgments for humans and robots. Such discrepancies may result from norms and stereotypes people apply to humans but not robots, and they may present challenges for human-robot interactions.