Differences and Biases in Mentalizing About Humans and Robots

Theory of Mind is the process of ascribing mental states to other individuals we interact with. It is used for sense-making of the observed actions and prediction of future actions. Previous studies revealed that humans mentalize about artificial agents, but it is not entirely clear how and to what extent. At the same time mentalizing about humans is often influenced by biases such as an egocentric bias. We present a study investigating differences in participants’ ToM and their susceptibility to an egocentric bias when observing humans vs robots. The participants observed an autonomous robot, a controlled robot, and a human in the same scenarios. The agents had to find an object in a laboratory. While watching the agents, participants had to make several action predictions as an implicit measure of ToM, potentially revealing an egocentric bias. At the end, questions about the agent’s responsibility, awareness and strategy were asked. The results indicate that while participants generally performed ToM for all types of agents, both the scenario as well as the agent type appear to influence participants’ likelihood of exhibiting an egocentric bias.