Perspective-taking for promoting prosocial behaviors through robot-robot VR task

Abstract

Perspective-taking, which enables individuals to consider the thoughts and objectives of another, is well established to be a successful strategy for encouraging pro-social behavior in human-computer interactions. Nowadays, perspective-taking is no longer limited to text; it is now more frequently used in virtual reality (VR). However, most previous research has focused on simulating human-human interactions in the real world in VR by providing participants with experiences connected to different moral tasks. In this study, we investigated whether participants’ prosocial behaviors toward robots would change if they experienced an altruistic VR task involving robots from the perspective of different robots. Our findings show that participants who had the help-receiver-view exhibited more altruistic behaviors toward a robot than those who had the help-provider-view one in a dictator game. We believe that this work is the first attempt to investigate the relationship between perspective-taking in a VR environment and changes in prosocial behavior in human-robot interaction.