Robots can defuse high-intensity conflict situations

TL;DR

This study explores how different affective expression modalities in robots can effectively defuse high-intensity conflicts with humans, highlighting that social awareness and appropriate reactions are key rather than specific expression modalities.

Contribution

It demonstrates that various affective expression modalities can successfully mitigate hostility in high-intensity human-robot conflicts, emphasizing the importance of social awareness over expression modality.

Findings

All tested modalities successfully defused conflict.

Movement modality differed significantly from others.

Participants perceived similar robot impact across modalities.

Abstract

This paper investigates the specific scenario of high-intensity confrontations between humans and robots, to understand how robots can defuse the conflict. It focuses on the effectiveness of using five different affective expression modalities as main drivers for defusing the conflict. The aim is to discover any strengths or weaknesses in using each modality to mitigate the hostility that people feel towards a poorly performing robot. The defusing of the situation is accomplished by making the robot better at acknowledging the conflict and by letting it express remorse. To facilitate the tests, we used a custom affective robot in a simulated conflict situation with 105 test participants. The results show that all tested expression modalities can successfully be used to defuse the situation and convey an acknowledgment of the confrontation. The ratings were remarkably similar, but the movement modality was different (ANON p$<$.05) than the other modalities. The test participants also had similar affective interpretations on how impacted the robot was of the confrontation across all expression modalities. This indicates that defusing a high-intensity interaction may not demand special attention to the expression abilities of the robot, but rather require attention to the abilities of being socially aware of the situation and reacting in accordance with it.