Cognitive Dissonance as a Measure of Reactions to Human-Robot Interaction

When people interact with intelligent agents, they likely rely upon a wide range of existing knowledge about machines, minds, and intelligence. This knowledge not only guides these interactions, but it can be challenged and potentially changed by interaction experiences. We hypothesize that a key factor mediating conceptual change in response to human-machine interactions is cognitive conflict, or dissonance. In this experiment, we tested whether interactions with a robot partner during a realistic medical triage scenario would cause increased levels of cognitive dissonance relative to a control condition in which the same task was performed with a human partner. In addition, we tested whether heightened levels of dissonance would affect concepts about agents. We observed increased cognitive dissonance after the human-robot interaction, and found that this dissonance was correlated with a significantly less intentional (e.g. human-like) view of the intelligence inherent to computers.