Verbal Disinhibition towards Robots is Associated with General Antisociality

The emergence of agentic technologies (e.g., robots) in increasingly public realms (e.g., social media) has revealed surprising antisocial tendencies in human-agent interactions. In particular, there is growing indication of people's propensity to act aggressively towards such systems - without provocation and unabashedly so. Towards understanding whether this aggressive behavior is anomalous or whether it is associated with general antisocial tendencies in people's broader interactions, we examined people's verbal disinhibition towards two artificial agents. Using Twitter as a corpus of free-form, unsupervised interactions, we identified 40 independent Twitter users who tweeted abusively or non-abusively at one of two high-profile robots with Twitter accounts (TMI's Bina48 and Hanson Robotics' Sophia). Analysis of 50 of each user's tweets most proximate to their tweet at the respective robot (N=2,000) shows people's aggression towards the robots to be associated with more frequent abuse in their general tweeting. The findings thus suggest that disinhibition towards robots is not necessarily a pervasive tendency, but rather one driven by individual differences in antisociality. Nevertheless, such unprovoked abuse highlights a need for attention to the reception of agentic technologies in society, as well as the necessity of corresponding capacities to recognize and respond to antisocial dynamics.

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