Determining the effect of human cognitive biases in social robots for human-robotm interactions

The research presented in this thesis describes a model for aiding human-robot interactions based on the principle of showing behaviours which are created based on 'human' cognitive biases by a robot in human-robot interactions. The aim of this work is to study how cognitive biases can affect human-robot interactions in the long term. Currently, most human-robot interactions are based on a set of well-ordered and structured rules, which repeat regardless of the person or social situation. This trend tends to provide an unrealistic interaction, which can make difficult for humans to relate ‘naturally’ with the social robot after a number of relations. The main focus of these interactions is that the social robot shows a very structured set of behaviours and, as such, acts unnaturally and mechanical in terms of social interactions. On the other hand, fallible behaviours (e.g. forgetfulness, inability to understand other’ emotions, bragging, blaming others) are common behaviours in humans and can be seen in regular social interactions. Some of these fallible behaviours are caused by the various cognitive biases. Researchers studied and developed various humanlike skills (e.g. personality, emotions expressions, traits) in social robots to make their behaviours more humanlike, and as a result, social robots can perform various humanlike actions, such as walking, talking, gazing or emotional expression. But common human behaviours such as forgetfulness, inability to understand other emotions, bragging or blaming are not present in the current social robots; such behaviours which exist and influence people have not been explored in social robots. The study presented in this thesis developed five cognitive biases in three different robots in four separate experiments to understand the influences of such cognitive biases in human–robot interactions. The results show that participants initially liked to interact with the robot with cognitive biased behaviours more than the robot without such behaviours. In my first two experiments, the robots (e.g., ERWIN, MyKeepon) interacted with the participants using a single bias (i.e., misattribution and empathy gap) cognitive biases accordingly, and participants enjoyed the interactions using such bias effects: for example, forgetfulness, source confusions, always showing exaggerated happiness or sadness and so on in the robots. In my later experiments, participants interacted with the robot (e.g., MARC) three times, with a time interval between two interactions, and results show that the likeness the interactions where the robot shows biased behaviours decreases less than the interactions where the robot did not show any biased behaviours. In the current thesis, I describe the investigations of these traits of forgetfulness, the inability to understand others’ emotions, and bragging and blaming behaviours, which are influenced by cognitive biases, and I also analyse people’s responses to robots displaying such biased behaviours in human–robot interactions