Cover not available

Article published In: Interaction Studies
Vol. 21:3 (2020) ► pp.303–328

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Some are more equal than others

Ingroup robots gain some but not all benefits of team membership

 | New Mexico State University, USA
 | Indiana University, USA
 | Indiana University, USA
Published online: 9 February 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18043.fra
Abstract
How do people treat robot teammates compared to human opponents? Past research indicates that people favor, and behave more morally toward, ingroup than outgroup members. People also perceive that they have more moral responsibilities toward humans than nonhumans. This paper presents a 2×2×3 experimental study that placed participants (N = 102) into competing teams of humans and robots. We examined how people morally behave toward and perceive players depending on players’ Group Membership (ingroup, outgroup), Agent Type (human, robot), and participant group Team Composition (humans as minority, equal, or majority within the ingroup compared to robots). Results indicated that participants favored the ingroup over the outgroup and humans over robots – to the extent that they favored ingroup robots over outgroup humans. Interestingly, people differentiated more between ingroup than outgroup humans and robots. These effects generalized across Team Composition.
Article outline
  • I.Introduction
  • II.Background
    • A.Group membership affects anthropomorphism and moral judgments
    • B.Agent type affects anthropomorphism and moral judgments
    • C.Team composition may affect group identification
      • Overview
  • III.Method
    • A.Design
    • B.Participants
    • C.Procedure
    • D.Robots
    • E.Task
    • F.Noise blast measure of moral behavior
    • G.Measures
      • Noise blasts
      • Surveys
        • Manipulation check
        • Group cohesion
        • Anthropomorphism
        • Attitudes and emotions
        • Future behavior
          • Preference for who wins: Advantage points
          • Favoritism outside of the game: Money for enhancement
          • Desire to reduce pain: Free pass
          • Moral behavior: Future noise blast distribution
          • Demographics
  • IV.Results
    • A.Manipulation check
      • Pain
      • Not like noise
    • B.Group cohesion
      • Cooperation
      • Competition
      • Feeling in group
    • C.Noise blasts volume
    • D.Anthropomorphism
      • 1.Correlation between anthropomorphism measures
      • 2.Human nature and uniquely human traits
        • Positive human nature traits
        • Negative human nature traits
        • Positive uniquely human traits
        • Negative uniquely human traits
      • 3.Agency and experience
        • Agency
        • Positive experience
        • Negative experience
    • E.Attitudes and emotions toward players
      • Attitude
      • Positive emotion
      • Negative emotion
    • F.Future behavior
      • Preference for humans: Advantage Points
      • Favoritism outside the game: Money for enhancement
      • Desire to reduce pain: Free pass
      • Moral behavior: Future noise blast distribution
  • V.Discussion
  • VI.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (42)
References
Ackerman, J. M., Shapiro, J. R., Neuberg, S. L., Kenrick, D. T., Becker, D. V., Griskevicius, V., … & Schaller, M. (2006). They all look the same to me (unless they’re angry) from out-group homogeneity to out-group heterogeneity. Psychological Science, 17(10), 836–840. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Admoni, H., Hayes, B., Feil-Seifer, D., Ullman, D., & Scassellati, B. (2013). Dancing With Myself: The effect of majority group size on perceptions of majority and minority robot group members. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 35, No. 35).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bartneck, C., Van Der Hoek, M., Mubin, O., & Al Mahmud, A. (2007, March). “Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do!” switching off a robot. In 2007 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 217–222). IEEE.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biernat, M., & Manis, M. (1994). Shifting standards and stereotype-based judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(1), 5. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Campbell, D. T. (1958). Common fate, similarity, and other indices of the status of aggregates of persons as social entities. Behavioral Science, 3(1), 14–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carpenter, J. (2016). Culture and human-robot interaction in militarized spaces: A war story: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Correia, F., Alves-Oliveira, P., Maia, N., Ribeiro, T., Petisca, S., Melo, F. S., & Paiva, A. (2016, August). Just follow the suit! trust in human-robot interactions during card game playing. In 2016 25th IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 507–512). IEEE. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Correia, F., Mascarenhas, S., Prada, R., Melo, F. S., & Paiva, A. (2018, February). Group-based emotions in teams of humans and robots. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 261–269). ACM. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Endsley, M. R. (1988, May). Situation awareness global assessment technique (SAGAT). In Proceedings of the IEEE 1988 National Aerospace and Electronics Conference (pp. 789–795). IEEE. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1995). Measurement of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 65–84. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eyssel, F., De Ruiter, L., Kuchenbrandt, D., Bobinger, S., & Hegel, F. (2012, March). ‘If you sound like me, you must be more human’: On the interplay of robot and user features on human-robot acceptance and anthropomorphism. In 2012 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 125–126). IEEE.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fraune, M. R., Kawakami, S., Šabanović, S., De Silva, R., & Okada, M. (2015). Three’s company, or a crowd?: The effects of robot number and behavior on HRI in Japan and the USA. Robotics: Science and Systems.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fraune, M. R., Šabanović, S., Smith, E. R., Nishiwaki, Y., & Okada, M. (2017, March). Threatening flocks and mindful snowflakes: How group entitativity affects perceptions of robots. In 2017 12th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI (pp. 205–213). IEEE.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fraune, M. R., & Šabanović, S. (2014, August). Negative attitudes toward minimalistic robots with intragroup communication styles. In The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp. 1116–1121). IEEE. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fraune, M. R., Šabanović, S., & Smith, E. R. (2017). Teammates first: Favoring ingroup robots over outgroup humans. In 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 1432–1437). IEEE. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fraune, M. R., Sherrin, S., Šabanović, S., & Smith, E. R. (2015, March). Rabble of robots effects: Number and type of robots modulates attitudes, emotions, and stereotypes. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 109–116). ACM. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315(5812), 619–619. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Greenwald, A. G., & Pettigrew, T. F. (2014). With malice toward none and charity for some: Ingroup favoritism enables discrimination. American Psychologist, 69(7), 669. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haslam, N., & Loughnan, S. (2014). Dehumanization and infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology, 651, 399–423. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haslam, N., Loughnan, S., Kashima, Y., & Bain, P. (2008). Attributing and denying humanness to others. European Review of Social Psychology, 19(1), 55–85. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hogg, M. A. (2010). Influence and leadership. Handbook of Social Psychology. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Insko, C. A., Hoyle, R. H., Pinkley, R. L., Hong, G.-Y., Slim, R. M., Dalton, B., … Bernthal, P. R. (1988). Individual-group discontinuity: The role of a consensus rule. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 24(6), 505–519. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Insko, C. A., Wildschut, T., & Cohen, T. R. (2013). Interindividual–intergroup discontinuity in the prisoner’s dilemma game: How common fate, proximity, and similarity affect intergroup competition. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 120(2), 168–180. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Judd, C. M., & Park, B. (1988). Out-group homogeneity: Judgments of variability at the individual and group levels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 778. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kahn Jr, P. H., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Freier, N. G., Severson, R. L., Gill, B. T., … Shen, S. (2012). “Robovie, you’ll have to go into the closet now”: Children’s social and moral relationships with a humanoid robot. Developmental Psychology, 48(2), 303. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kahn, P. H., Reichert, A. L., Gary, H. E., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Shen, S., … & Gill, B. (2011, March). The new ontological category hypothesis in human-robot interaction. In 2011 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 159–160). IEEE.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kim, Y., & Sundar, S. S. (2012). Anthropomorphism of computers: Is it mindful or mindless? Computers in Human Behavior, 28(1), 241–250. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuchenbrandt, D., Eyssel, F., Bobinger, S., & Neufeld, M. (2013). When a Robot’s Group Membership Matters. International Journal of Social Robotics, 5(3), 409–417. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, S. L., & Lau, I. Y. M. (2011, March). Hitting a robot vs. hitting a human: is it the same?. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction (pp. 187–188). ACM. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leidner, B., & Castano, E. (2012). Morality shifting in the context of intergroup violence. European Journal of Social Psychology, 42(1), 82–91. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leite, I., McCoy, M., Lohani, M., Ullman, D., Salomons, N., Stokes, C., … & Scassellati, B. (2015, March). Emotional storytelling in the classroom: Individual versus group interaction between children and robots. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 75–82). ACM. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levine, J. M., & Moreland, R. L. (1994). Group socialization: Theory and research. European Review of Social Psychology, 5(1), 305–336. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Loughnan, S., & Haslam, N. (2007). Animals and androids implicit associations between social categories and nonhumans. Psychological Science, 18(2), 116–121. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nass, C., Fogg, B., & Moon, Y. (1996). Can computers be teammates? International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 45(6), 669–678. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robertson, J. (2017). Robot Reincarnation. Life in Post-Bubble Japan, 1531.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sachdev, I., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1991). Power and status differentials in minority and majority group relations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 21(1), 1–24. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Suzuki, M. (2015). A Funeral for ‘Aibo’Robot Dogs at a Temple Near Tokyo.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behaviour. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1(2), 149–178. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Twenge, J. M., Baumeister, R. F., Tice, D. M., & Stucke, T. S. (2001). If you can’t join them, beat them: effects of social exclusion on aggressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 1058. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Waytz, A., Gray, K., Epley, N., & Wegner, D. M. (2010). Causes and consequences of mind perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(8), 383–388. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wullenkord, R., Fraune, M. R., Eyssel, F., & Šabanović, S. (2016). Getting in touch: How imagined, actual, and physical contact affect evaluations of robots. In 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 980–985). IEEE. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (15)

Cited by 15 other publications

Abrams, Anna M. H., Ann-Sophie L. Schenk & Astrid M. Rosenthal-von der Pütten
2026. Intergroup Bias Towards Robots? Investigating the Effects of Social Categorisation, Ingroup Identification and the Country of Origin of Robots. International Journal of Social Robotics 18:2 DOI logo
Barfield, Jessica K.
2026. Evaluating Biases for Robots Presenting with Perceived National Identities. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Arlinghaus, Clarissa Sabrina, Carolin Straßmann & Annika Dix
2025. Increased morality through social communication or decision situation worsens the acceptance of robo-advisors. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans 5 ► pp. 100173 ff. DOI logo
Seaborn, Katie
2025. Social Identity in Human-Agent Interaction: A Primer. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction DOI logo
Tan, Xiaojiayu, Yue He, Yuan Zhou, Xinying Li, Qingwen Ding, Yikai Tang, Yu L. L. Luo & Ruolei Gu
2025. Born to Fear the Machine? Genetic and Environmental Influences on Negative Attitudes toward AI Agents. Advanced Science 12:35 DOI logo
Chen, Na, Jiajia Cao & Xueyan Hu
2024. The Effects of Robot Managers’ Reward-Punishment Behaviours on Human–Robot Trust and Job Performance. International Journal of Social Robotics 16:3 ► pp. 529 ff. DOI logo
Collins, Sawyer, Marlena R. Fraune, Kyrie Jig Amon, Eliot R. Smith & Selma Šabanović
2024. 2024 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN), ► pp. 1503 ff. DOI logo
Leshner, Connor E. & Jessica R. Johnson
2024. Technically in love: Individual differences relating to sexual and platonic relationships with robots. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 41:8 ► pp. 2345 ff. DOI logo
Wilson, Cobe Deane, Danielle Langlois & Marlena R. Fraune
2024. Strangers on a Team?: Human Companions, Compared to Strangers or Individuals, are More Likely to Reject a Robot Teammate. International Journal of Social Robotics 16:4 ► pp. 699 ff. DOI logo
Au, Rachel Hoi Yan, Marlena R. Fraune & Ricarda Wullenkord
2023. Unethical Robot Teammates: The Effects of Wrongdoer Identity and Entity Type on Whistleblowing and Intergroup Dynamics. International Journal of Social Robotics 15:9-10 ► pp. 1473 ff. DOI logo
Chavez Gonzalez, Aldo, Marlena R. Fraune & Ricarda Wullenkord
2022. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, ► pp. 148 ff. DOI logo
Correia, Filipa, Sean Christeson, Samuel F. Mascarenhas, Ana Paiva & Marlena Fraune
2022. I Know I Am, But What Are You? How Culture and Self-Categorization Affect Emotions Toward Robots. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6:CSCW2 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Green, Haley N., Md Mofijul Islam, Shahira Ali & Tariq Iqbal
2022. 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), ► pp. 313 ff. DOI logo
Oliveira, Raquel, Patrícia Arriaga & Ana Paiva
2021. Human-Robot Interaction in Groups: Methodological and Research Practices. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 5:10 ► pp. 59 ff. DOI logo
Fraune, Marlena R.
2020. Our Robots, Our Team: Robot Anthropomorphism Moderates Group Effects in Human–Robot Teams. Frontiers in Psychology 11 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 march 2026. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue