Reciprocity in human robot interaction.
The Journey is the Reward Chinese Proverb Reciprocity is a basic characteristic of Human Human Interaction (HHI) However, there have not been many previous studies about reciprocity in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) The imminent coming of social robots interacting with users in their daily spaces has encouraged researchers in HRI to describe these new relations between humans and robots in terms of reciprocity, persuasion, likeability, and trust. Consequently, these studies could have an impact on the design of new social robots. The development of this thesis considers three main research questions: 1. To what extent do humans reciprocate towards robots? 2. To what extent can robots use reciprocation for their own benefit? 3. What are the most beneficial and preferred reciprocal strategies between humans and robots? I used Game Theory to develop three experimental studies. Decision games such as Prisoner's Dilemma, Ultimatum Game, Repeated Ultimatum Game and Rock, Paper, Scissors were used in the experiments. These games offer an engaging interaction between the participants and the robots, and they allow measuring of the variables related to reciprocity in HRI. The operationalisation of the studies was done under the definition of Reciprocity proposed by Fehr and Gaechter [53] which explains: in response to friendly actions, people are frequently much nicer and much more cooperative than predicted by the self interest model; conversely, in response to hostile actions they are frequently much more nasty and even brutal. In addition to this, in the first and third study the "tit for tat" strategy was used with different modifications since it is a well studied reciprocal strategy tested in previous experiments. Our main goal was to measure to what extent the Norm of Reciprocity,"to those who help us, we should return help, not harm" proposed by Gouldner [63] applies to Human Robot Interaction in all the studies.