More Than You Expect: Priors Influence on the Adoption of Intentional Stance Toward Humanoid Robots

Humans predict others’ behavior based on mental state inferences and expectations created on previous interactions. On the brink of the introduction of artificial agents in our social environment, the question of whether humans would use similar cognitive mechanisms to interact with these agents gains relevance. Recent research showed that people could indeed explain the behavior of a robot in mentalistic terms. However, there is scarce evidence regarding how expectations modulate the adoption of these mentalistic explanations. The present study aims at creating a questionnaire that measures expectations regarding the capabilities of the robot and testing whether these priors modulate the adoption of the intentional stance toward artificial agents. We found that individual expectations might influence the adoption of mentalistic explanations. After a show period of observation, participants with higher expectations tended to explain iCub’s behavior in mentalistic terms; meanwhile, participants with lower expectations maintained their mechanistic explanations of behavior. Our findings suggest that expectations about capabilities and purpose of the robot might modulate the adoption of intentional stance toward artificial agents.