How Did We Miss This?

Abstract

With societies growing more and more conscious of human social biases that are implicit in most of our interactions, the development of automated robot social behavior is failing to address these issues as more than just an afterthought. In the present work, we describe how we unintentionally implemented robot listener behavior that was biased toward the gender of the participants, while following typical design procedures in the field. In a post-hoc analysis of data collected in a between-subject user study (n=60), we find that both a rule-based and a deep learning-based listener behavior models produced a higher number of backchannels (listener feedback, through nodding or vocal utterances) if the participant identified as a male. We investigate the cause of this bias in both models and discuss the implications of our findings. Further, we provide approaches that may be taken to address the issue of algorithmic fairness, and preventative measures to avoid the development of biased social robot behavior.