The impact of stereotyping errors on a robot´s social development

Psychologists note that social cognition often involves the creation, refinement, and use of models of one´s interactive partners. The influence of categorical thinking on interpersonal expectations is commonly referred to as a stereotype. Using an algorithm that we created for stereotype learning, we investigate problems that can occur when the robot acquires its first models of people and learns its first stereotypes-the robot´s early social development. We examine if the errors related to the creation of these initial models have a disproportionate impact on the robot´s developing social skills, perhaps even reflecting some of the same challenges faced by humans [1]. We hypothesized that errors in which the robot interacted with someone that did not represent the true nature of a category, an outlier, would impact the robot´s performance on a social coordination task more if the error occurred earlier in the robot´s social development rather than later. Results from simulation confirmed our hypothesis. The results of this work have potential implications for social robotics, autonomous agents, and possibly psychology.