Christoph Bartneck

• PhD
• Professor at University of Canterbury

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/3721488.3721617 A recent psychology study found that people are more likely to reject an overly generous offer from an agent (human or robot) when there is no clear justification. This "money backfire effect'' is said to stem from perceived phantom costs (e.g., agent's bad intentions). However, their online versio...

The current cycle of hype and anxiety concerning the benefits and risks to human society of Artificial Intelligence is fuelled, not only by the increasing use of generative AI and other AI tools by the general public, but also by claims made on behalf of such technology by popularizers and scientists. In particular, recent studies have claimed that...

This volume provides a unique perspective on an emerging area of scholarship and legislative concern: the law, policy, and regulation of human-robot interaction (HRI). The increasing intelligence and human-likeness of social robots points to a challenging future for determining appropriate laws, policies, and regulations related to the design and u...

Online questionnaires that use crowdsourcing platforms to recruit participants have become commonplace, due to their ease of use and low costs. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based large language models (LLMs) have made it easy for bad actors to automatically fill in online forms, including generating meaningful text for open-ended tasks. These techn...

A fair and inclusive competition depends on a scoring system that takes all relevant factors into account. We analysed the current World Para Point System for swimming and identified several theoretical and practical disadvantages. We propose and test a Fair World Para Point System that not only improves the algorithm, but also extends it to accomm...

Online questionnaires that use crowd-sourcing platforms to recruit participants have become commonplace, due to their ease of use and low costs. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Large Language Models (LLM) have made it easy for bad actors to automatically fill in online forms, including generating meaningful text for open-ended tasks. These techn...

Theories are an integral part of the scientific endeavour. The target article proposes interesting ideas for a theory on human-robot interaction but lacks specificity that would enable us to properly test this theory. No empirical data are yet available to determine its predictive power.

The arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in our society has sparked many hopes and fears, with people having diverging views on the need to strictly regulate AI. The current study investigates how demographic and personality traits are associated with a desire to strictly regulate AI using a representative sample of adults from New Zealand (N =...

The Godspeed Questionnaire Series (GQS) is one of the most highly cited and used questionnaire in the field of Human-Robot Interaction and Human-Agent Interaction. Since its inception in 2009, it has been translated into 19 languages. In this chapter, we discuss the history and development of the GQS as well its psychometric properties. For the fir...

The constantly rising demand for human-like conversational agentsand the accelerated development of natural language processingtechnology raise expectations for a breakthrough in intelligent ma-chine research and development. However, measuring intelligenceis impossible without a proper test. Alan Turing proposed a test formachine intelligence base...

Recent research suggests that implicit self-theories—a theory predicated on the idea that people’s underlying beliefs about whether self-attributes, such as intelligence, are malleable (incremental theory) or unchangeable (entity theory), can influence people’s perceptions of emerging social robots developed for everyday use. Other avenues of resea...

Robots that are capable of outperforming human beings on mental and physical tasks provoke perceptions of threat. In this article we propose that implicit self-theory (core beliefs about the malleability of self-attributes, such as intelligence) is a determinant of whether one person experiences threat perception to a greater degree than another. W...

Mind perception is a fundamental part of anthropomorphism and has recently been suggested to be a dual process. The current research studied the influence of implicit and explicit mind perception on a robot’s right to be protected from abuse, both in terms of participants condemning abuse that befell the robot as well as in terms of participants’ t...

Understanding people’s perceptions and inferences about social robots and, thus, their responses toward them, constitutes one of the most pervasive research themes in the field of Human–Robot interaction today. We herein augment and extend this line of work by investigating, for the first time, the novel proposition that one’s implicit self-theory...

In human-chatbot interaction, users casually and regularly offend and abuse the chatbot they are interacting with. The current paper explores the relationship between chatbot humanlikeness on the one hand and sexual advances and verbal aggression by the user on the other hand. 283 conversations between the Cleverbot chatbot and its users were harve...

Among of the factors that affect likeability, reciprocal response towards the other party is one of the multiple variables involved in social interaction. However, in HRI, likeability is constrained to robot behavior, since mass-produced robots will have identical physical embodiment. A reciprocal robot response is desirable in order to design robo...

Robots in Education is an accessible introduction to the use of robotics in formal learning, encompassing pedagogical and psychological theories as well as implementation in curricula. Today, a variety of communities across education are increasingly using robots as general classroom tutors, tools in STEM projects, and subjects of study. This volum...

There have been multiple incidents where humans attacked robots in a public environment (Brscić et al., in: Proceedings of the international conference on human–robot interaction, ACM/IEEE, Portland, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1145/2696454.2696468); Vincent, in: A drunk man was arrested for knocking over Silicon Valley’s crime-fighting robot, 2017, h...

In this chapter we discuss the different definitions of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We then discuss how machines learn and how a robot works in general. Finally we discuss the limitations of AI and the influence the media has on our preconceptions of AI.

This chapter describes what autonomous vehicles are and how they work. We then discuss the associated risks and benefits not only from an ethical perspective, but also from a legal and environmental view. Core issues discussed are liability and safety of autonomous vehicles.

This chapter sheds light on how private data is systematically collected, stored and analysed with the help of artificial intelligence. We discuss various forms of persistent surveillance at home and in public spaces. While massive data collection raises considerable ethical concerns, it is also the basis for better performance for AI systems.

This section discusses several applications of AI to specific areas and illustrates the challenges and importance of ethics in these areas. While we cover autonomous vehicles and military uses of AI in separate chapters, here we discuss issues of AI for enhancement, healthcare and education.

This chapter discusses the general risks that businesses face before considering specific ethical risks that companies developing AI systems and robots need to consider. Guidance on how to manage these risks is provided. It is argued that companies should do what is ethically desirable not just the minimum that is legally necessary. Evidence is giv...

This book provides an introduction into the ethics of robots and artificial intelligence. The book was written with university students, policy makers, and professionals in mind but should be accessible for most adults. The book is meant to provide balanced and, at times, conflicting viewpoints as to the benefits and deficits of AI through the lens...

The recent success of AI and robotics has massively increased the international awareness of and the interest in these topics as a factor of economic competitiveness. This concerns not only businesses, but also regional and national governments. There are many claims about the potential for AI to create new service and product innovation. Such clai...

This chapter discusses the question of who is responsible in the case of an accident involving a robot or an AI system that results in some form of damage. Assigning liability is challenging because of the complexity of the situation and because of the complexity of the system. We discuss examples of an autonomous vehicle accident and mistargeting...

In this chapter we discuss the controversial topic of autonomous weapons systems. We define terms, present elements and perspectives related to the debate surrounding autonomous weapons systems (AWS) and present the main arguments for and against the use of such systems.

In this chapter we discuss how people relate to robots and autonomous systems from a psychological point of view. Humans tend to anthropomorphise them and form unidirectional relationships. The trust in these relationships is the basis for persuasion and manipulation that can be used for good and evil.

This chapter introduces the theories that form the basis of the ethical review of robots and AI systems. We introduce the major approaches to moral theory (deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics) and discuss the relation of ethics to law. Finally, we discuss how these theories might be implemented in a machine to enable it to make ethical d...

This chapter discusses the role that trust and fairness play in the acceptance of AI systems. We then relate trust and fairness in AI systems to five principles: Non-maleficence, Beneficence, Autonomy, Justice and Explicability.

Most people struggle to understand probability which is an issue for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers who need to communicate risks and uncertainties to the participants in their studies, the media and policy makers. Previous work showed that even the use of numerical values to express probabilities does not guarantee an accurate understan...

It is not uncommon for humans to exhibit abusive behaviour towards robots. This study compares how abusive behaviour towards a human is perceived differently in comparison with identical behaviour towards a robot. We showed participants 16 video clips of unparalleled quality that depicted different levels of violence and abuse. For each video, we a...

The role of robots in society keeps expanding and diversifying, bringing with it a host of issues surrounding the relationship between robots and humans. This introduction to human-robot interaction (HRI), written by leading researchers in this developing field, is the first to provide a broad overview of the multidisciplinary topics central to mod...

Emotions play an important role in human-agent interaction. To realise natural interaction it is essential for an agent to be able to analyse the sentiment in users' utterances. Modern agents use a distributed service model in which their functions can be located on any number of computers including cloud-based servers. Outsourcing the speech recog...

Previous studies showed that using the 'shooter bias' paradigm, people demonstrate a similar racial bias toward dark colored robots over light colored robots (i.e., Black vs. White) as they do toward humans of similar skin tones [3]. However, such an effect could be argued to be the result of social priming. Additionally, it raises the question of...

Anthropomorphism, the attribution of humanlike characteristics to nonhuman entities, may be resulting from a dual process: first, a fast and intuitive (Type 1) process permits to quickly classify an object as humanlike and results in implicit anthropomorphism. Second, a reflective (Type 2) process may moderate the initial judgment based on consciou...

The first robotic copies of real humans have become available. They enable their users to be physically present in multiple locations simultaneously. This study investigates the influence that the embodiment of an agent has on its persuasiveness and its perceived personality. Is a robotic copy as persuasive as its human counterpart? Does it have th...

In recent years, the uncanny valley theory has been heavily investigated by researchers from various fields. However, the videos and images used in these studies do not permit any human interaction with the uncanny objects. Therefore, in the field of human–robot interaction, it is still unclear what impact, if any, an uncanny-looking robot will hav...

Humans recognise and respond to robots as social agents, to such extent that they occasionally aaempt to bully a robot. e current paper investigates whether aggressive behaviour directed towards robots is innuenced by the same social processes that guide human bullying behaviour. More speciically, it measured the eeects of dehumanisation primes and...

Abyss Creations LLC is selling highly realistic and anatomically complete dolls for decades. The interaction that customers have with the dolls has been subject to many controversial discussions. David Levy already showed that humanity has been rather inventive when it comes to machines that useful for sexual purposes. Abyss Creations recently reve...

Most robots currently being sold or developed are either stylized with white material or have a metallic appearance. In this research we used the shooter bias paradigm and several questionnaires to investigate if people automatically identify robots as being racialized, such that we might say that some robots are 'White' while others are 'Asian', o...

The LEGO Group has become the largest toy company in the world and they can look back to a proud history of more than 50 years of producing bricks and other toys. Starting with a simple set of basic bricks their range of toys appeared to have increased in complexity over the years. We processed the inventories of most sets from 1955–2015 and our an...

Emotional facial expression are an important communication channel between artificial characters and their users. Humans are trained to perceive emotions. Robots and virtual agents can use them to make their inner states transparent. Literature reported that some emotional types, such as anger, are perceived as being more intense than others. Other...

Anthropomorphism plays an important role in human interaction with robots. However, our understanding of this phenomenon is still limited. In the previous research, we proposed to look at the work on dehumanization in order to understand what factors can affect a robot’s anthropomorphism. Moreover, considering that there are two distinct dimensions...

Robots are able to influence the usage of human language even after the interaction between the human and robot has ended. Humans influence each other in the usage of words, and hence, the robots they program indirectly affect the development of our society’s vocabulary. Most human–robot interaction studies focus on one robot interacting with one h...