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ABSTRACT In two studies based on Stanley Milgram's original pilots, we present the first systematic examination of cyranoids as social psychological research tools. A cyranoid is created by cooperatively joining in real-time the body of one person with speech generated by another via covert speech shadowing. The resulting hybrid persona can subsequ...
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... [15] claimed that the effect can apply beyond machines, such that a human lacking experience (e.g., psychopaths) could also elicit the uncanny valley effect. For example, in [6], they asked the participants to speak with a partner who was assumed to be a human but actually speech shadowing for an AI chatbot. Results showed that the participants expressed discomfort towards their partners. ...
Intelligent conversational agents, or chatbots, can take on various identities and are increasingly engaging in more human-centered conversations with persuasive goals. However, little is known about how identities and inquiry strategies influence the conversation's effectiveness. We conducted an online study involving 790 participants to be persuaded by a chatbot for charity donation. We designed a two by four factorial experiment (two chatbot identities and four inquiry strategies) where participants were randomly assigned to different conditions. Findings showed that the perceived identity of the chatbot had significant effects on the persuasion outcome (i.e., donation) and interpersonal perceptions (i.e., competence, confidence, warmth, and sincerity). Further, we identified interaction effects among perceived identities and inquiry strategies. We discuss the findings for theoretical and practical implications for developing ethical and effective persuasive chatbots. Our published data, codes, and analyses serve as the first step towards building competent ethical persuasive chatbots.
... Other projects have been driven by artistic motivations [12] or a wish to foster various forms of empathy such as adults gaining insight into the embodied lives of children [26] students acting as surrogates for absent teachers [31] or sharing spatial awareness [13]. These sort of set-ups have also been explored as research tool e.g. for design [21] and in more laboratory like settings for various neurological and psychological topics such as understanding how a brain creates an image of its body [29], reducing prejudice [17] and mediating stereotyping [2]. ...
Positive social and collaborative effects are hailed as a major advantage of embodied and tangible approaches to interaction. This studio offers a hands-on exploration of potentially extreme versions of such benefits - systems and techniques that somehow share or transfer embodiment between two or more people. Through participatory demos, studio attendees will explore and compare a variety of approaches to experiencing the perspectives of another body, and controlling bodies other than their own. These comparisons will be a launch pad for collaboratively combining existing “body sharing” systems and mocking up new design concepts. By bringing together ideas and approaches in an actionable manner, this studio will share and develop imagination, theory, and skills relevant to the design and study of interactive systems in which the body plays a central role.
... On the one side, theater can be a means to collect data. Alex Gillespie and artist Robb Mitchell, together with Kevin Corti and other colleagues, have thus developed the cyranoid experiment, drawing on a Milgram's proposition, presenting a theatrical performance in public spaces (universities, art galleries) to generate the experience for viewers and to collect data on social interactions (Corti & Gillespie, 2015;Raudaskoski & Mitchell, 2013). ...
Imagination plays a central role in theater. This chapter first examines how psychology has apprehended theater-as a metaphor, a tool, a cultural experience and as a sociocultural practice. It then examines the particular case of documentary theater, a genre used to bring on stage informative contents aimed at developing the viewer's critical stance. Altogether, the authors propose a sociocultural understanding of imagination, and thus show how more specifically the theatrical choices made in the recent play Décris-Ravage triggers the viewers’ active imagination, invite them to reflect on the knowledge they have, or initiate a movement of further exploration. Finally, the authors sketch the consequences for an understanding of theater as a cultural form, and of imagination.
... Milgram died before he could carry out the research he envisioned and failed to produce a journal article detailing his use of cyranoids. The method lay dormant until we carried out the first systematic experiments on the robustness of the method (Corti and Gillespie, 2015b). Our first study compared cyranoid interactions with non-cyranoid interactions. ...
... Again, video analysis of the interactions, debrief interviews, and post-interaction questionnaires showed that the cyranic illusion still held; participants believed they were interacting with an autonomous person despite incongruities between the body they saw and the words they heard. Futhermore, we were able to show how participants interacted differently with the same speech source (child or professor) depending on the body that spoke (Corti and Gillespie, 2015b). ...
This article examines advances in research methods that enable experimental substitution of the speaking body in unscripted face-to-face communication. A taxonomy of six hybrid social agents is presented by combining three types of bodies (mechanical, virtual, and human) with either an artificial or human speech source. Our contribution is to introduce and explore the significance of two particular hybrids: (1) the cyranoid method that enables humans to converse face-to-face through the medium of another person's body, and (2) the echoborg method that enables artificial intelligence to converse face-to-face through the medium of a human body. These two methods are distinct in being able to parse the unique influence of the human body when combined with various speech sources. We also introduce a new framework for conceptualizing the body's role in communication, distinguishing three levels: self's perspective on the body, other's perspective on the body, and self's perspective of other's perspective on the body. Within each level the cyranoid and echoborg methodologies make important research questions tractable. By conceptualizing and synthesizing these methods, we outline a novel paradigm of research on the role of the body in unscripted face-to-face communication.
... A particular strength of the echoborg method, which itself is derived from the "cyranoid method" of social interaction (Corti & Gillespie, 2015b), is that it enables the study of social interactions that are high in mundane realism (dynamic, unscripted and faceto-face). The benefits of such realism, however, incur costs in the form of certain control limitations. ...
This article explores whether people more frequently attempt to repair misunderstandings when speaking to an artificial conversational agent if it is represented as fully human. Interactants in dyadic conversations with an agent (the chat bot Cleverbot) spoke to either a text screen interface (agent's responses shown on a screen) or a human body interface (agent's responses vocalized by a human speech shadower via the echoborg method) and were either informed or not informed prior to interlocution that their interlocutor's responses would be agent-generated. Results show that an interactant is less likely to initiate repairs when an agent-interlocutor communicates via a text screen interface as well as when they explicitly know their interlocutor's words to be agent-generated. That is to say, people demonstrate the most “intersubjective effort” toward establishing common ground when they engage an agent under the same social psychological conditions as face-to-face human–human interaction (i.e., when they both encounter another human body and assume that they are speaking to an autonomously-communicating person). This article's methodology presents a novel means of benchmarking intersubjectivity and intersubjective effort in human-agent interaction.
... The echoborg concept stems from work conducted by Corti and Gillespie (2015), whose application of Milgram's (2010) "cyranoid method" of social interaction demonstrates a means of creating hybrid human entities via an audio-vocal technique known as "speech shadowing. " Speech shadowing involves a person (the shadower) voicing the words of an external source simultaneously as those words are heard (Schwitzgebel and Taylor, 1980). ...
... The teachers had succumbed to the "cyranic illusion, " that is, the tendency to perceive interlocutors as autonomous communicators and thus fail to notice an interlocutor that is a cyranoid. Corti and Gillespie (2015) argue that one of the cyranoid method's primary strengths is that it allows the researcher to manipulate one component of the cyranoid, either the shadower or the source, while keeping the other component fixed. Thus, one can study how the same source is perceived when interacting through a variety of shadower-types. ...
... While Corti and Gillespie's (2015) recent work was conducted in the laboratory, it follows recent field explorations of cyranoids in experiential art installations (Mitchell, 2009) and as classroom learning tools (Raudaskoski and Mitchell, 2013). Taken together, these studies outline a number of basic protocols for constructing cyranic interactions and discuss the devices necessary for creating a basic cyranoid apparatus, which involves both a means of discreetly transmitting audio from the source to the shadower as well as a means for the source to hear (and, if possible, see) the interaction between the shadower and the interactant. ...
We use speech shadowing to create situations wherein people converse in person with a human whose words are determined by a conversational agent computer program. Speech shadowing involves a person (the shadower) repeating vocal stimuli originating from a separate communication source in real-time. Humans shadowing for conversational agent sources (e.g., chat bots) become hybrid agents (“echoborgs”) capable of face-to-face interlocution. We report three studies that investigated people’s experiences interacting with echoborgs and the extent to which echoborgs pass as autonomous humans. First, participants in a Turing Test spoke with a chat bot via either a text interface or an echoborg. Human shadowing did not improve the chat bot’s chance of passing but did increase interrogators’ ratings of how human-like the chat bot seemed. In our second study, participants had to decide whether their interlocutor produced words generated by a chat bot or simply pretended to be one. Compared to those who engaged a text interface, participants who engaged an echoborg were more likely to perceive their interlocutor as pretending to be a chat bot. In our third study, participants were naïve to the fact that their interlocutor produced words generated by a chat bot. Unlike those who engaged a text interface, the vast majority of participants who engaged an echoborg did not sense a robotic interaction. These findings have implications for android science, the Turing Test paradigm, and human–computer interaction. The human body, as the delivery mechanism of communication, fundamentally alters the social psychological dynamics of interactions with machine intelligence.
... In his most elaborate iteration of the cyranoid method, Milgram (2010a) separately sourced for 11-and 12-year-old children while being interviewed by panels of teachers tasked with assessing their interviewee's intellectual capabilities (for a replication of this study, see Corti and Gillespie 2015). The teachers were unaware their interlocutors were in fact shadowers articulating the words of a college professor, thus Milgram experienced conversing with these teachers as though he had the identity of a child. ...
The current article argues that researcher-as-subject self-experimentation can provide valuable insight and systematic knowledge to social psychologists. This approach, the modus operandi of experimental psychology when the field was in its infancy, has been largely eclipsed by an almost exclusive focus on participant-as-subject other-experimentation. Drawing from the non-experimental first-person traditions of autoethnography, participant observation, and phenomenology, we argue that participating as both observer and subject within one’s own social psychological experiment affords researchers at least three potential benefits: (1) access to “social qualia,” that is, the subjective experience of social phenomena; (2) improved mental models of social phenomena, potentially stimulating new research questions; and (3) an enhanced ability to be reflexive about the given experiment. To support our position, we provide first-person self-reflections from researchers who have self-experimented with transformed social interactions involving Milgram’s cyranoid method. We close by offering guidelines on how one might approach self-experimentation, and discuss a variety of first-person perspective ethnographic technologies that can be incorporated into the practice.
... Creating a mobile, covert cyranoid capable of socially interacting with others requires utilizing a basic amalgam of simple gadgetry (detailed overviews of which can be found in Corti & Gillespie, 2014; as well as in Mitchell, Gillespie, & O'Neill, 2011). In a basic apparatus, the shadower wears a discreet wireless inner-ear radio receiver that picks up audio from a signal transmitted by the source. ...
... yranoid technique brings these concepts of hybridity and transformed social identity into the realm of actual (i.e., non-virtual) human-human interactions. Cyranoidinteractant interactions are face-to-face encounters involving real human beings as stimuli, and in that sense come much closer to simulating the realism of real-world social encounters. Corti and Gillespie (2014) provide a replication of the unpublished cyranoid studies Milgram describes in his 1984 APA speech. Their first study explored whether research subjects would detect when a male confederate was speech shadowing for a female source during face-to-face interlocution (relative to a control condition in which the male confederate spoke auto ...
Cyrafour is an activity that considers the opportunities of using human avatars (cyranoids) for empathic interpersonal remote communication.
An unscripted conversation between two individuals (the sources) is transmitted through radio waves and reproduced by two copresent subjects (the cyranoids) following certain conversational guidelines.
Cyrafour could be considered as a playful embodied identity game in which cyranoids are simultaneously together in and aside from a conversation generated elsewhere.
Based upon observations of, and interviews with young adults participating in such encounters, we suggest that this puzzling circumstance may allow for an empathic embodiment of the meaning transmitted and appears to create a frame for further discussion on the topics raised. This activity appears to offer potential for the nurturing of the interpersonal understandings that are the
essential social glue of contemporary organisational life
