Effects of Context, Assistance, and Communication on Beliefs About Cooperation in Human-Machine Teaming

The efficacy of future human-machine teaming will be determined by the ability of machine agents to engage in teamwork behaviors and processes with their human teammates. A critical aspect of teamwork is cooperation, as team members must work interdependently to achieve common goals. In the current experiment we investigated how violations of cooperation expectations, presented to participants in a narrative vignette, influenced ratings of cooperation on a novel measure derived from social interdependence theory. Our results indicated that participants’ ratings of cooperation were strongly influenced by actions associated with assisting and communicating with a cooperating partner; violations in these expectations resulted in much lower estimates of cooperation, though the identity of the actors as two humans or a human and a robot did not appear to matter. Overall, this is an important first step to understanding the factors that influence perceptions of cooperation in human-machine teaming.