Should I Help a Delivery Robot? Cultivating Prosocial Norms through Observations

We propose leveraging prosocial observations to cultivate new social norms to encourage prosocial behaviors toward delivery robots. With an online experiment, we quantitatively assess updates in norm beliefs regarding human-robot prosocial behaviors through observational learning. Results demonstrate the initially perceived normativity of helping robots is influenced by familiarity with delivery robots and perceptions of robots' social intelligence. Observing human-robot prosocial interactions notably shifts peoples' normative beliefs about prosocial actions; thereby changing their perceived obligations to offer help to delivery robots. Additionally, we found that observing robots offering help to humans, rather than receiving help, more significantly increased participants' feelings of obligation to help robots. Our findings provide insights into prosocial design for future mobility systems. Improved familiarity with robot capabilities and portraying them as desirable social partners can help foster wider acceptance. Furthermore, robots need to be designed to exhibit higher levels of interactivity and reciprocal capabilities for prosocial behavior.