Social Responses to Collaborator: Dilemma Game with Human and Computer Agent

We performed an experiment where participants engaged in the Prisoner's Dilemma game either with a human or a computer agent. In the experiment, we controlled two factors: (1) expectation about a partner, i.e., whether a partner is believed to be a human or computer agent, and (2) actual partner’s behavior, i.e., whether (a) a partner performs with human-like sophisticated behavior or (b) simple mechanical behavior. Participant decision-making behavior showed that their defect actions greatly increased when instructed that their partner was a computer agent; the effect of the actual partner's behavior was limited. Personality impression tests showed that the partner's individual desirability correlated to the number of times defected by the partner, but the partner's social desirability correlated to the number of defect actions that the participants offered. Our conclusion is that humans actually generate social relationships with computer agents, as the Media Equation studies have insisted; however these relationships are relatively different from those with humans.