Too good to be true: People reject free gifts from robots because they infer bad intentions

[2404.07409] Too good to be true: People reject free gifts from robots because they infer bad intentions Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Search arXiv Press Enter to search · Advanced search Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction arXiv:2404.07409 (cs) [Submitted on 11 Apr 2024] Title: Too good to be true: People reject free gifts from robots because they infer bad intentions Authors: Benjamin Lebrun , Andrew Vonasch , Christoph Bartneck View a PDF of the paper titled Too good to be true: People reject free gifts from robots because they infer bad intentions, by Benjamin Lebrun and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: A recent psychology study found that people sometimes reject overly generous offers from people because they imagine hidden ''phantom costs'' must be part of the transaction. Phantom costs occur when a person seems overly generous for no apparent reason. This study aims to explore whether people can imagine phantom costs when interacting with a robot. To this end, screen or physically embodied agents (human or robot) offered to people either a cookie or a cookie + \$2. Participants were then asked to make a choice whether they would accept or decline the offer. Results showed that people did perceive phantom costs in the offer + \$2 conditions when interacting with a human, but also with a robot, across both embodiment levels, leading to the characteristic behavioral effect that offering more money made people less likely to accept the offer. While people were more likely to accept offers from a robot than from a human, people more often accepted offers from humans when they were physically compared to screen embodied but were equally likely to accept the offer from a robot whether it was screen or physically embodied. This suggests that people can treat robots (and humans) as social agents with hidden intentions and knowledge, and that this influences their behavior toward them. This provides not only new insights on how people make decisions when interacting with a robot but also how robot embodiment impacts HRI research. Comments: 35 pages, 6 figures Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) Cite as: arXiv:2404.07409 [cs.HC] (or arXiv:2404.07409v1 [cs.HC] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2404.07409 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Journal reference: International Journal of Social Robotics, Volume 18, article number 58, (2026) Related DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-026-01395-x Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources Submission history From: Benjamin Lebrun [ view email ] [v1] Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:49:08 UTC (2,616 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Too good to be true: People reject free gifts from robots because they infer bad intentions, by Benjamin Lebrun and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.HC < prev | next > new | recent | 2024-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... 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