Effects of observing a robot expressing approach-avoidance conflict on observers’ self-evaluations of personal courage

Courage involves pursuing a valued action despite fear, hesitation, or competing motives. However, the pre-action conflict relevant to judging an act as courageous is difficult to observe directly and manipulate systematically when another human serves as the model. Robots provide a means of representing such otherwise covert motives in a controlled and reproducible form. We therefore examined how a robot’s expression of approach-avoidance conflict is perceived and how it relates to observers’ immediate self-evaluations of personal courage. Speech bubbles were projected near the head of a cylindrical robot to present approach and avoidance motives in a scenario in which the robot encountered a person littering in a park. Study 1 compared conflict and no-conflict conditions and sequential and simultaneous presentation methods to determine whether a robot expressing approach-avoidance conflict was perceived as courageous. Study 2 varied whether the robot expressed one motive direction or both approach and avoidance motives and whether it admonished the litterer, and examined whether post-stimulus courage self-evaluations differed according to observers’ preexisting courage tendency. In Study 1, the conflict condition yielded higher courage and conflict ratings than the no-conflict condition. In Study 2, the predicted three-way interaction was not supported. Instead, we observed an interaction between preexisting courage tendency group and conflict expression that was not specified in the primary hypothesis, with self-evaluations in the conflict condition tending to be higher in the low-courage group and lower in the high-courage group. Although neither group’s conflict contrast was significant after correction for multiple comparisons, this contrasting pattern is an exploratory finding suggesting that robot-expressed conflict may be received differently depending on observers’ preexisting courage tendency. The study provides a controlled HRI paradigm for examining how robot-expressed motives are perceived and raises the possibility that user characteristics may be relevant when designing robots that display cues to internal processes.