People's dispositional cooperative tendencies towards robots are unaffected by robots' negative emotional displays in prisoner's dilemma games.

The study explores the impact of robots' emotional displays on people's tendency to cooperate with a robot opponent in prisoner's dilemma games. Participants played iterated prisoner's dilemma games with a non-expressive robot (as a measure of cooperative baseline), followed by an angry, and a sad robot, in turn. Based on the Emotion as Social Information model, we expected participants with higher cooperative predispositions to cooperate less when a robot displayed anger, and cooperate more when the robot displayed sadness.

Empathy and Schadenfreude in Human-Robot Teams.

Intergroup dynamics shape the ways in which we interact with other people. We feel more empathy towards ingroup members compared to outgroup members, and can even feel pleasure when an outgroup member experiences misfortune, known as schadenfreude. Here, we test the extent to which these intergroup biases emerge during interactions with robots.