Attribution of intentional agency towards robots reduces one’s own sense of agency

In the presence of others, sense of agency (SoA), i.e. the perceived relationship between our own actions and external events, is reduced. The present study aimed at investigating whether the phenomenon of reduced SoA is observed in human-robot interaction, similarly to human-human interaction. To this end, we tested SoA when people interacted with a robot (Experiment 1), with a passive, non-agentic air pump (Experiment 2), or when they interacted with both a robot and a human being (Experiment 3). Participants were asked to rate the perceived control they felt on the outcome of their action while performing a diffusion of responsibility task. Results showed that the intentional agency attributed to the artificial entity differently affect the performance and the perceived SoA on the outcome of the task. Experiment 1 showed that, when participants successfully performed an action, they rated SoA over the outcome as lower in trials in which the robot was also able to act (but did not), compared to when they were performing the task alone. However, this did not occur in Experiment 2, where the artificial entity was an air pump, which had the same influence on the task as the robot, but in a passive manner and thus lacked intentional agency. Results of Experiment 3 showed that SoA was reduced similarly for the human and robot agents, threby indicating that attribution of intentional agency plays a crucial role in reduction of SoA. Together, our results suggest that interacting with robotic agents affects SoA, similarly to interacting with other humans, but differently from interacting with non-agentic mechanical devices. This has important implications for the applied of social robotics, where a subjective decrease in SoA could have negative consequences, such as in robot-assisted care in hospitals.