Errare humanum est: Erroneous Robots in Human-Robot Interaction

Perfect memory, strong reasoning abilities and flawless performance are typical cognitive traits associated with robots. In contrast, forgetting and erroneous reasoning are typical cognitive patterns of humans. This discrepancy may fundamentally affect the way how robots and humans interact and collaborate together and is today still little explored. In this paper, we investigate the effect of differences between erroneous and perfect robots in a competitive scenario in which humans and robots solve reasoning tasks and memorize numbers. Participants are randomly assigned to one of two groups: in the first group they interact with a perfect, flawless robot, while in the second, they interact with a human-like robot with occasional errors and imperfect memorizing abilities. Participants rate attitude, sympathy, and attributes of the robot in a questionnaire and we measure their task performance. The results show that the erroneous robot triggered more positive emotions but lead to a lower human performance than the perfect one. Effects of both conditions on the group of students with and without technical background are reported.