{"id":2113172,"date":"2019-07-24T08:24:11","date_gmt":"2019-07-24T12:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=2113172"},"modified":"2019-07-24T08:24:11","modified_gmt":"2019-07-24T12:24:11","slug":"robots-emotions-work-2113172","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/robots-emotions-work-2113172\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling fond of robots makes for better teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

We develop attachments to the robots we work with and those emotions can affect team performance, report researchers.<\/p>\n

Soldiers develop attachments to the robots that help them diffuse bombs in the field. Despite numerous warnings about privacy, millions of us trust smart speakers like Alexa to listen into our daily lives. Some of us name our cars and even shed tears when we trade them in for shiny new vehicles.<\/p>\n

Research has shown that individually we develop emotional, trusting relationships with robotic technology, but until now scientists have known little about the attachments groups that work with robots form.<\/p>\n

Teamwork and connecting with robots<\/h3>\n

Previous studies have focused on linking emotional attachment to robots with individual fun and enjoyment in more playful settings, says Sangseok You, who began what he and colleagues believe is the first study of its kind on attachment between groups and robots as a doctoral candidate at the School of Information at the University of Michigan.<\/p>\n

“We found that humans perform better with robotic teammates when they have strong emotional attachment to them,” says You, now an assistant professor at HEC Paris. “This means that organizations like Amazon should invest in approaches that encourage their employees to have some level of emotional attachment with their robotic coworkers.”<\/p>\n

For their study in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems<\/em><\/a>, the researchers recruited 114 human participants, assigned to 57 teams\u2014two people, two robots per team. They split participants into four groups\u2014the researchers identified some teams by robot, some by team, some by both robot and team, and some by neither. The task was to move five water bottles from one point to another.<\/p>\n

Those the researchers identified by robot and by team all developed emotional attachments to their robot teammates. With the emotional attachment came better performance and team viability. The researchers asked one group to come up with a team name and gave them jerseys for the participants and their robots to see if identification with a team enhanced attachment. It was only marginally significant.<\/p>\n

Among many questions on a multipart survey that sought to gauge attitudes and understanding about robots as well as perceptions of the experiment were:<\/p>\n