Social Facilitation with Non-Human Agents: Possible or not?

摘要

As interactions with non-human agents increase, it is important to understand and predict the consequencesrnof human interactions with them. Social facilitation has a longstanding history within the realm of socialrnpsychology and is characterized by the presence of other humans having a beneficial effect on performancernon easy tasks and inhibiting performance on difficult tasks. While social facilitation has been shown acrossrntask types and experimental conditions with human agents, very little research has examined whether thisrneffect can also be induced by non-human agents and, if so, to what degree the level of humanness and embodimentrnof those agents influences that effect. In the current experiment, we apply a common social facilitationrntask (i.e., numerical distance judgments) to investigate to what extent the presence of agents of varyingrndegrees of humanness benefits task performance. Results show a significant difference in performancernbetween easy and difficult task conditions, but show no significant improvement in task performance in thernsocial presence conditions compared to performing the task alone. This suggests that the presence of othersrndid not have a positive effect on performance, at least not when social presence was manipulated via stillrnimages. Implications of this finding for future studies, as well as for human-robot interaction are discussed.