Getting By With a Little Help From Our… Friends?: Researching Social Robots
As a Fritz Family Fellow, Dr. Mark Hanin, a postdoctoral fellow at Ethics Lab, is conducting research on interactions with social robots and analyzing how these relationships might impact humans’ ability to form bonds with other people.
In its inaugural year, the Fritz Family Fellowship has facilitated collaborations between Georegtown’s three campuses and nine schools with 14 fellows conducting research on the social impacts of technology.
The program includes undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and professional fellows, each of whom is advised by two faculty members in different academic units. Haley Randell, the Fritz Family Fellowship Coordinator, emphasized the collaborative nature of the fellowship.
“Our word is collaboration, collaboration, collaboration,” Randell said. “What’s really amazing for the fellows is that they are getting to pick brains of multiple different people and getting mentorship not just from one thought or one mind, but from multiple people.”
Dr. Mark Hanin, a postdoctoral fellow at Ethics Lab, is one of the postdoctoral Fritz fellows. One of his strands of research focuses on anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human characteristics to non-human entities. Dr. Hanin—who is being advised by Prof. Maggie Little, the director of Ethics Lab, and Prof. Meg Jones of the Communication, Culture and Technology Program—is specifically interested in how extended interactions with sophisticated robots might affect people’s abilities to form meaningful bonds with other people. He noted that a related area of study is the manipulation or deception that may arise as a result of human-robot interactions.
“Some people name their cars and ascribe certain feelings and things to other familiar inanimate objects. This tendency also manifests when we deal with social robots and even chat bots. So, the question is, when does it make sense and when doesn’t it?” Dr. Hanin explained.
Dr. Hanin cited the iPal, a robot companion that is marketed for children and the elderly, as a possible case study for his research. He also commented on the case of a Japanese man who in 2018 married Hatsune Miku, a virtual “pop star” that is actually an anthropomorphic singing voice synthesizer.
Dr. Hanin also has research interests in digital addiction and the value of attention in the digital age that he is hoping to pursue during the Fellowship in 2020-2021. While the shape of final deliverables is still fluid, Dr. Hanin will be sharing occasional updates here on the Ethics Lab website.
Suggested reading:
Elizabeth Broadbent, “Interactions With Robots: The Truths We Reveal About Ourselves,” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 68 (2017): pp. 627–52.