Would You Help Me? Linking Robot's Perspective-Taking to Human Prosocial Behavior

Despite the growing literature on human attitudes toward robots, particularly prosocial behavior, little is known about how robots' perspective-taking, the capacity to perceive and understand the world from other viewpoints, could influence such attitudes and perceptions of the robot. To make robots and AI more autonomous and self-aware, more researchers have focused on developing cognitive skills such as perspective-taking and theory of mind in robots and AI. The present study investigated whether a robot's perspective-taking choices could influence the occurrence and extent of exhibiting prosocial behavior toward the robot. We designed an interaction consisting of a perspective-taking task, where we manipulated how the robot instructs the human to find objects by changing its frame of reference and measured the human's exhibition of prosocial behavior toward the robot. In a between-subject study (N=70), we compared the robot's egocentric and addressee-centric instructions against a control condition, where the robot's instructions were object-centric. Participants' prosocial behavior toward the robot was measured using a voluntary data collection session. Our results imply that the occurrence and extent of prosocial behavior toward the robot were significantly influenced by the robot's visuospatial perspective-taking behavior. Furthermore, we observed, through questionnaire responses, that the robot's choice of perspective-taking could potentially influence the humans' perspective choices, were they to reciprocate the instructions to the robot.