The effect of a robotic agent on dishonest behavior

Future human-robot interactions will have to consider different human traits. One human feature that may be affected by the presence of virtual agents or robots is human honesty. Will people try to take advantage in the presence of a robot/virtual agent? Some previous studies have shown that the physical presence of a robot can decrease cheating in humans. In this paper, we investigated if merely a simple video of a robot looking at the user was enough to affect human's cheating behavior. Further, we also investigated if the Honesty-Humility personality trait predicted cheating. We conducted a study with 160 participants that were randomly allocated to one of two conditions: (1) performing the task with a video of a robot looking at them, or (2) doing the task alone. Results showed that being alone or with a video of a robot produced equal levels of cheating and the Honesty-Humility dimension predicted cheating, particularly the fairness sub-domain was responsible for predicting cheating behavior. This study has implications for future scenarios where dishonesty might be tempting, and physical presence of an observer might not be possible.