Switzerland: A new study has stated that people tend to pay less attention to tasks when working alongside a robot.
The researchers have found evidence of “social loafing,” a situation where team members work less hard if they think others will cover for them.
Researchers at the Technical University of Berlin stated that people come to see robots as part of their team. “Where they think a colleague—or the technology—performs particularly well or where they think their own contribution would not be appreciated, people tend to take a more laid-back approach,” the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI, noted.
“Teamwork is a mixed blessing. Working together can motivate people to perform well, but it can also lead to a loss of motivation because the individual contribution is not as visible. We were interested in whether we could also find such motivational effects when the team partner is a robot,” Mr. Dietlind Helene Cymek, the first author of the study, commented.
During the study, the team asked workers to check the quality of a series of tasks, half of whom were told the tasks had been performed by a robot. While they did not work directly with the robot, named Panda, those people had seen it and were able to hear it operating. Initially, they said they found no statistical difference in the time the two groups—those who were told they were working with a robot and those who were not—spent inspecting the circuit boards or in the area they searched for errors.
When the researchers investigated the participants’ error rates, they found those working with Panda were catching fewer defects after they had seen the robot had successfully flagged many errors. The research team noted that this could reflect a “looking but not seeing” effect, where people engage less once they feel a colleague or resource is reliable.
“It is easy to track where a person is looking, but much harder to tell whether that visual information is being sufficiently processed at a mental level,” Dr. Linda Onnasch, a senior author of the study, shared.
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