Nobody likes to listen to people trash talk to them. While you might think you could just brush it off and move on, a new study claims otherwise. As per the study, words like "You've done a terrible job at this" can actually prove to be rather daunting. In fact, they cause so much stress that they can be harmful to your health even if they've been said by a robot.
The study conducted was able to find that people who interacted with a commercially available humanoid robot known as Pepper performed well when the robot encouraged their actions and did badly if the robot discouraged them. It was also noted that among the 40 participants, some were technically sophisticated enough to understand that their cause for distress was a machine.
“One participant said, ‘I don’t like what the robot is saying, but that’s the way it was programmed so I can’t blame it,’" said Lead author Aaron M. Roth, who conducted the study. Nevertheless, the study found that when discouraged, the participants' overall performance lowered regardless of whether they were receiving the discouragement from a human or robot.
The purpose of the study was to also find out how humans and robots can work best together instead of just the traditional human-robot interaction. “This is one of the first studies of human-robot interaction in an environment where they are not cooperating,” said Fei Fang, an assistant professor in the Institute for Software Research at CMU. “We can expect home assistants to be cooperative, but in situations such as online shopping, they may not have the same goals as we do,” said Fang.
The researchers also designed a game for the participants to play against the robots. During each game, people either received praise from the robots or were discouraged by them. Even though people eventually started playing rationally, the participants who were discouraged didn't perform as well as the participants who were encouraged.
This alone helped researchers understand that while people may not respond well to trash talk from other people, they also don't respond well to negative comments from robots. This also proves that people, in general, do not respond well to negative comments irrespective of who's making them. Stay tuned for more updates.
