Designing nudge agents that promote human altruism

TL;DR

This study investigates how specific nudging techniques applied to social robot videos can enhance human altruism, demonstrating that the peak-end effect significantly influences altruistic behavior in an online experiment.

Contribution

It introduces the application of peak-end and multiple viewpoints nudging mechanisms to social robot stimuli to promote altruism, filling a research gap in social robotics.

Findings

Peak-end nudging increased altruistic behavior in participants.

Participants exposed to the peak-end stimulus performed better in the Dictator game.

The study confirms nudging effects extend to social robotics contexts.

Abstract

Previous studies have found that nudging is key to promoting altruism in human-human interaction. However, in social robotics, there is still a lack of study on confirming the effect of nudging on altruism. In this paper, we apply two nudge mechanisms, peak-end and multiple viewpoints, to a video stimulus performed by social robots (virtual agents) to see whether a subtle change in the stimulus can promote human altruism. An experiment was conducted online through crowdsourcing with 136 participants. The result shows that the participants who watched the peak part set at the end of the video performed better at the Dictator game, which means that the nudge mechanism of the peak-end effect actually promoted human altruism.