What’s In a Name and/or A Frame? Ontological Framing and Naming of Social Actors and Social Responses

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally a communication field. Thus, the study of how AI interacts with us is likely to be heavily driven by communication. The current study examined two things that may impact people’s perceptions of socialness of a social actor: one nonverbal (ontological frame) and one verbal (providing a name) with a 2 (human vs. robot) x 2 (named or not) experiment. Participants saw one of four videos of a study “host” crossing these conditions and responded to various perceptual measures about the socialness and task ability of that host. Overall, data were consistent with hypotheses that whether the social actor was a robot or a human impacted each perception tested, but whether the social actor named themself or not had no effect on any of them, contrary to hypotheses. These results are then discussed, as are directions for future research.