Question

Some researchers once conducted an experiment where they asked participants to sit side by side with a robot while playing a video game. The robot spoke like a human and appeared to exhibit some human traits such as intelligence, friendliness, helpfulness, rudeness, and meanness. The robot was intelligent, nice, helpful, and gave advice on how to advance to higher levels of the game to half of the participants during the video game, to the other half, it was rude, insulting, mean, and mocked their gaming ability. At the end of the game, whether the robot was friendly and helpful or rude and mean, a scientist would tell the study participants that they would be required to turn the robot off after playing the video game, and it was also made clear to them what the consequences of that would be: "They would essentially eliminate everything that the robot was — all of its memories, all of its behavior, all of its personality would be gone forever." Although every participant eventually 'terminated' the robot, the participants who were treated nicely by the robot took an average of 40 seconds to complete the task. These participants also displayed a fair amount of emotional unease with turning the robot off. The participants that were treated poorly by the robot turned the robot off within 10 seconds and showed a lower level of emotional unease regarding the task.

          Some researchers once conducted an experiment where they asked participants to sit side by side with a robot while playing a video game. The robot spoke like a human and appeared to exhibit some human traits such as intelligence, friendliness, helpfulness, rudeness, and meanness. The robot was intelligent, nice, helpful, and gave advice on how to advance to higher levels of the game to half of the participants during the video game, to the other half, it was rude, insulting, mean, and mocked their gaming ability. At the end of the game, whether the robot was friendly and helpful or rude and mean, a scientist would tell the study participants that they would be required to turn the robot off after playing the video game, and it was also made clear to them what the consequences of that would be: "They would essentially eliminate everything that the robot was — all of its memories, all of its behavior, all of its personality would be gone forever."

Although every participant eventually 'terminated' the robot, the participants who were treated nicely by the robot took an average of 40 seconds to complete the task. These participants also displayed a fair amount of emotional unease with turning the robot off. The participants that were treated poorly by the robot turned the robot off within 10 seconds and showed a lower level of emotional unease regarding the task.

Added by Ian H.

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