https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/empathy-machine-humans-communicate-better-after-robots-show-their-vulnerable-side/

Robots are more prevalent in daily life than ever before. Digital assistants control smartphone apps, while physical bots teach students in schools, sanitize hospitals and deliver food. Scientists have long been studying human-robot interactions to learn how these machines can influence individuals’ behavior, such as altering how well someone completes a task or responds to a robotic request. But new research shows the presence and actions of robots also affect the way humans relate to other humans—in this case, swaying team members to communicate better.

“While other work has focused on how to more easily integrate robots into teams, we focused instead on how robots might positively shape the way that people react to each other,” says Sarah Sebo, a graduate student at Yale University and co-author of the research, published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. To measure these changes in reactions, researchers at Yale and Cornell University assigned participants to teams of four—consisting of three people and one small humanoid robot—and had them play a collaborative game on Android tablets. In some groups, the robots were programmed to act “vulnerable.” These machines performed actions such as apologizing for making mistakes, admitting to self-doubt, telling jokes, sharing personal stories about their “life,” and talking about how they were “feeling.” In control groups, the human participants teamed up with robots that made only neutral statements or remained entirely silent.