While there are valid concerns about robots, artificial intelligence, and widespread automation taking away jobs, these technologies are also praised for their ability to augment human tasks. But a new study shows that when people think their teammates, including robots, have done the heavy lifting, they tend to be less engaged in their work, a phenomenon known as "social loafing."
When a person believes that his or her colleagues will take over their job, they will be less engaged in their work. Researchers at TU Berlin wanted to see whether social loafing could occur when humans work alongside robots.
Dietlin Helene Cymek, first author of the study, said in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI: "Teamwork is a mixed blessing. Working together can motivate people to perform tasks well, but it can also cause people to become demotivated because individual contributions are not obvious. We were interested in whether we could also find this motivational effect when the team partner is a robot."
The scientists tested their theory, asking 42 participants to look at images of circuit boards for 90 minutes to spot any errors. The image is blurry and the sharpened board can only be seen by placing the mouse tool over the image. This way, the scientists could track participants' inspection of the boards.
Half of the participants were told that their circuit boards had been inspected by a robot called Panda, that they could hear Panda's voice and that they had seen it before.
At first, there seemed to be little difference between the two groups of participants, as they spent the same amount of time checking the board and looking for errors in the same areas.
However, when the researchers scrutinized the participants' error rates, they found that those who worked with Panda found fewer defects after seeing the robot successfully flag many errors. This may reflect a "missing the forest for the trees" effect, where people become accustomed to relying on something - in this case a robot - and thus become less engaged in the task.
Participants were also asked to rate their performance. They thought they paid the same level of attention, but one suspects they subconsciously began to think that "Panda" didn't miss any flaws.
"It's easy to track a person's gaze, but it's much harder to know whether that person's visual information is being adequately processed at a psychological level," said Dr. Linda Onasch, senior author of the study.
There were concerns that the findings could have implications for workplace safety, particularly as "loss of motivation tends to be greater where shifts are longer, tasks are routine, and the work environment provides little performance monitoring and feedback."
"In manufacturing in general, and especially in safety-related areas where duplicate inspections are common, this can have a negative impact on work results."