Research studies conducted at Carnegie Mellon University shows that demotivating and despairing words can badly affect a person and it does not who utters them. The studies were conducted when people were playing matches and a robot was kept there to mock them. And the results were very shocking since the robot was the one speaking.

A study was made led by Aaron Roth, in which humanoid Robot Pepper mocked the players playing video games. The robot used phrases like “I have to say you are a terrible player” and “Over the course of the game your playing has become confused.” And kept on saying such phrases again and again.

After playing with the robot as their opponent two results were drawn. When the robot was supportive the players played better and with much more enthusiasm whereas when the robot was being and using discouraging phrases the results were also negative. The players were less enthusiastic and failed in their games.

About 40 participants were frustrated and annoyed the robot’s continuously despairing words, but could not do anything because it was programmed that way. The study was mainly focused on human-android interaction, that is, how humans react with androids when they are not cooperating. This will help them to analyze how human-androids will work together in the same working place.

Technology is advancing at a very fast pace and we are moving towards a world where artificial intelligence is becoming very important. It is very important to keep pace with the advancing knowledge and artificial intelligence sneaking in our lives. One has to make sure that the humans and androids are on the same page and pace.

In professional lives, we can expect the androids to be cooperative, more intelligent and quicker than humans. But when it comes to making choices while shopping online we can’t make sure that they would respect the choices that we would want.

In the study, the players were pitted against the robots and they were playing “Guards and Treasures” which uses rationality. This study which originated from a student project uses the basis of game theory where rationality in context to the robots was tested.

Each participant had to play the game 35 times where sometimes the robots were supportive and sometimes they were discouraging. It was proved that the results were better when the robots were supportive whereas not as happy results were observed when the robots were discouraging. One can come to only one conclusion that discouraging words even from a robot can affect the performance of a person.

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