Seeming autonomy, technology and the uncanny valley

Entanglements of Technologies, Agency and Selfhood: Exploring the Complexity in Attitudes Toward Mental Health Chatbots

Whilst chatbots for mental health are becoming increasingly prevalent, research on user experiences and expectations is relatively scarce and also equivocal on their acceptability and utility. This paper asks how people formulate their understandings of what might be appropriate in this space. We draw on data from a group of non-users who have experienced a need for support, and so can imagine self as therapeutic target-enabling us to tap into their imaginative speculations of the self in relation to the chatbot other and the forms of agency they see as being at play; unconstrained by a specific actual chatbot. Analysis points towards ambiguity over some key issues: whether the apps were seen as having a role in specific episodes of mental health or in relation to an ongoing project of supporting wellbeing; whether the chatbot could be viewed as having a therapeutic agency or was a mere tool; and how far these issues related to matters of the user's personal qualities or the specific nature of the mental health condition. A range of traditions, norms and practices were used to construct diverse expectations on whether chatbots could offer a solution to cost-effective mental health support at scale.

Exploring Autistic College Students' Perceptions and Management of Peer Stigma: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Autistic college students are often forced to navigate stigma on campus, but little is known about how autistic college students manage communicated stigma. Semi-structured interviews with ten autistic college students were conducted to explore how they manage peer stigma. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to identify three themes from the data: First, participants seek to avoid peer stigma by concealing attributes associated with autism. Next, participants buffer against peer stigma by engaging in favorable social comparison. Finally, participants perceive the autism label as highly stigmatizing, necessitating limited disclosure on campus. These results can help researchers and practitioners focus efforts to promote neurodiversity to both autistic students and their peers on campus.

Anthropomorphization and beyond: conceptualizing humanwashing of AI-enabled machines

The complex relationships between humans and AI-empowered machines have created and inspired new products and services as well as controversial debates, fiction and entertainment, and last but not least, a striving and vital field of research. The (theoretical) convergence between the two categories of entities has created stimulating concepts and theories in the past, such as the uncanny valley, machinization of humans through datafication, or humanization of machines, known as anthropomorphization. In this article, we identify a new gap in the relational interaction between humans and AI triggered by commercial interests, making use of AI through advertisement, marketing, and corporate communications. Our scope is to broaden the field of AI and society by adding the business-society-nexus. Thus, we build on existing research streams of machinewashing and the analogous phenomenon of greenwashing to theorize about the humanwashing of AI-enabled machines as a specific anthropomorphization notion. In this way, the article offers a contribution to the anthropomorphization literature conceptualizing humanwashing as a deceptive use of AI-enabled machines (AIEMs) aimed at intentionally or unintentionally misleading organizational stakeholders and the broader public about the true capabilities that AIEMs possess.

Attribution of autonomy and its role in robotic language acquisition

The false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article, we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire, we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called intent interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed.

Novelty Knows No Boundaries: Why a Proper Investigation of Novelty Effects Within SHRI Should Begin by Addressing the Scientific Plurality of the Field

Research on psychological novelty effects within the fields of Social Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction (together: SHRI) so far has failed to gather the momentum it deserves. With the aid of exemplary descriptions of how psychological novelty is currently approached and researched across (certain main regions of) the larger scientific landscape, I argue that the treatment of novelty effects within the multidisciplinary SHRI reflects larger circumstances of fragmentation and heterogeneity in novelty research in general. I further propose that while the concept of novelty may currently function as a Boundary Object between the contributing domains of SHRI, a properly integrated, interdisciplinary concept of novelty is needed in order to capture and investigate the scope and scale of novelty effects within research on social human-robot interaction. Building on research on the New Ontological Category Hypothesis and related studies, I argue that the novelty of social robots can be understood as radical to the extent that their comprehension requires revisions of traditional core categories of being. In order to investigate the sui generis effects of such novelty, which should not be narrowly understood as mere “noise” in the data, it is paramount that the field of SHRI begin by working out a shared, integrative framework of psychological novelty and novelty effects.

A Meta-analysis of the Uncanny Valley's Independent and Dependent Variables

The uncanny valley (UV) effect is a negative affective reaction to human-looking artificial entities. It hinders comfortable, trust-based interactions with android robots and virtual characters. Despite extensive research, a consensus has not formed on its theoretical basis or methodologies. We conducted a meta-analysis to assess operationalizations of human likeness (independent variable) and the UV effect (dependent variable). Of 468 studies, 72 met the inclusion criteria. These studies employed 10 different stimulus creation techniques, 39 affect measures, and 14 indirect measures. Based on 247 effect sizes, a three-level meta-analysis model revealed the UV effect had a large effect size, Hedges’ g = 1.01 [0.80, 1.22]. A mixed-effects meta-regression model with creation technique as the moderator variable revealed face distortion produced the largest effect size, g = 1.46 [0.69, 2.24], followed by distinct entities, g = 1.20 [1.02, 1.38], realism render, g = 0.99 [0.62, 1.36], and morphing, g = 0.94 [0.64, 1.24]. Affective indices producing the largest effects were threatening, likable, aesthetics, familiarity , and eeriness , and indirect measures were dislike frequency, categorization reaction time, like frequency, avoidance , and viewing duration . This meta-analysis—the first on the UV effect—provides a methodological foundation and design principles for future research.