Social Loafing with Robots – An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Social loafing describes a phenomenon in human-human interaction of reduced effort when working in a team compared to working individually. With the increasing growth of human-robot teams, studying potential social loafing effects in human-robot interaction seems increasingly relevant. In a laboratory experiment, participants worked on two parallel tasks with a human or a robotic partner. The primary task was once completed coactively and once collectively with the respective partner and a shared task output. Performance measures revealed no effects regarding partner or working condition. However, subjective data revealed that participants invested the least effort when working collectively with the robot compared to working collectively with a human or in the coactive conditions. At the same time, the robot’s performance was perceived as worse compared to the human confederate’s performance. Based on the results we discuss that interacting with robots shares social facets of human teamwork but does not resemble it.